I used textures from Tom Patterson (www.shadedrelief.com) to recreate Earth as seen from space. As opposed to most submission these days original Blender engine was used which results in really speedy rendering times (sub 1 minute for most full HD frames) + you can see almost final in 3D view in real time if you select material preview.
The whole scene contains only one light source and two spheres, one for the atmosphere and one for the earth surface with clouds, so animations with no tweaking are possible. The final result had to have marbelly look. This is what I was aiming for.
Reason I did this is because I wanted to play with nodes. Although nodes editing with blender original rendering engine is a bit illogical, it still provides lot's of fun.
Most important lesson from this demo is that playing with texture nodes still requires some understanding of linear algebra, so please lookup what dot product of vectors does.
If you need original .blend file I can provide that too.
