Today I started trying to improve the appearance of the planet from space. The biggest problem so far with the space scene is that the textures will degrade with the vertex complexity - so when you view the planet from far away, the textures look bad, due to the LOD being low. I now generate a 1024^2 texture at runtime that I use to texture the planet beyond a certain threshold. When you get closer, the higher detail texturing is blended in, until the ‘base’ texture is gone. This means that I have a much more detailed look from space.
Here’s a couple pictures of the method, with the atmosphere toggled. It still doesn’t look very realistic compared to some implementations, but I think it’s just a matter of getting some better colours, non-fake cloud effects, and atmospheric glow. It looks better than the old version already, though.
