Blender Photorealistic Planet Study + Breakdown

These are the results of a planet shader that I've been working on for probably years now. These are fully volumetric, partially procedural, and they render in a reasonable amount of time. The shading on the clouds is created using a custom lighting engine built into blender's shader nodes. This is necessary because clouds have complex light interactions that can't be replicated natively in blender using blender's volume scattering implementation (at least without considerable noise and lengthy render times).