yes i have a feeling you are right. to get anything approaching realistic it would have to be a custom shader of some kind. i doubt we can get close just by “choosing the right sss colour”
I did a closer version to see what was happening at that level and I am happy with the approach for the clouds…naturally more variations in models will make for a better outcome
but as a ‘proof of concept’ I reckon it looks pretty workable, albeit madly scaled. I’ll tweak to fit, with more variation…
I meant to add earlier that I am using a filmic for the output which deals somewhat with the falloff…anyway, try this map and see if works for you.
I’m tired of looking at it for now, so will review in a day 
ATMOSPHERE FALLOFF.rar (699 KB)
I woke with an urge to retry from scratch, knowing what I know now.
So this is actually a little different, using a whole sphere for the volume and tweaking it
to get what is expected, using that same basic falloff map.
Running with your idea of sss clouds, these are just displaced onto another sphere.
I need a better map but this is adequate for testing.
Lighting is swapped to a sphere/light material.
What I’m pleased with is the render time of 10 mins at 4k, of just 2 passes with 0.01 noise, using the intel denoiser,
which it turns out does a massively quicker and better job than the default Vray one for this scene.
I have a sequence showing full traversal, to see whether people reckon the lighting works, but that’ll take a while…
I of course ended up with spaceships…gotta have some fun amongst all the brain work and pixel-musing 
Having spent a good deal of time on this, I reckon I’d have to opt for this basic method; SSS for the atmosphere, purely
because it renders so quickly and has the option of mapped opacity. The rest of it…the terminator shift and whatever else can be hacks.
Scattervolume is a render time-sink, so however nice it’s pointless but for stills and still a pain to set up.
It’s a shame because as was noted, you lose the cool atmosphere shadows from the volume.
Based on that alone, it seems like a wishlist thing for some more options and a speed up to be looked at for the volume method
or more capability added to the sss method. As always, I’m no coder, so no have idea how feasible that is but they are both so tantalisingly close to the ideal solution.
I note that no dev types have commented on this thread as yet…that’s probably because they are already hard at work on the fixes and upgrades
so, did anyone manage to get something that looks nice with the sun peeping out from behind the earth? ill probably need to do some shots like that for the next project and ive not found something that works even remotely yet.
p.s. nice spaceships:o
the setup I had works fine I think…will up a pic when back later on tonight.
of the sun peeking I mean.
this site is annoying on mobile I just discovered…
Wow, this is looking insanely good!
hey thanks! overall im pretty happy with it, but i really want to take it to the next level, and more importantly, i want it to look good, as mentioned, when the sun pops out from behind and the atmosphere is backlit and glows, plus all the volumetric and scattering goodness that a real atmosphere gives… with my setup im still quite limited in the shots i can do.. plus, of course, however high res the textures are, if you zoom in to the country level you rapidly run out of resolution.
im toying with the idea of using vraydecal to add high res patches when i need to zoom in, but ive not tried yet.
be nice if somebody made a “google maps” streaming texture plugin, apply the texture, and it streams the correct zoom level for how close you are… that would be awesome, even if the quality on google maps isnt hugely consistent, with bands of different colour etc… however… the zoooooooom!
i suspect also because its not currently possible to simulate an earth atmosphere realistically in vray 
Just thinking again about this…sort of.
I need an earth zoom for a hopefully upcoming project and the issue is the size of the Earth map.
I guess @supergnu, that you got yours from the same company as you are doing this for?
If not, and you didn’t find them already, I managed to hunt down a repository for the enormous maps from
2004 http://www.opengutenberg.net/nasa/bmng/world\_500m/
They may still be at the NASA site but this is a simple list, so still worth bookmarking.
It contains tiles for 12 months of seasonal change, so very useful for anyone else that could use them.
Final image is 86k wide/1.3gb, which was impossible to use when I first found these almost 20 years ago, or whenever they first
were published…now, no problem
Wow, this is fantastic!
anybody tried that with GPU?
next time I will try CPU. volume grid gets way too big on GPU as there is no way to cut it with geo. it’s too slow but atmosphere behaves quite ok I guess (no ozone and mie accounted for).
max file attached (2020).
also version with VRayFastSSS2 (simple):
mP_EarthAtmo_20082022.zip (1.21 MB)
I would love to but my 2080ti can’t handle the textures 
Moon image looks great
moon shot is a ripoff from nasa’s gallery, there was no memory left for displacing clouds..
can you fill VRayVolumeGrid with VRayDistanceTex on cpu? I think this setup could be faster on cpu (fraction of grid size).
Yeah all my tests were cpu and I can’t remember having any problems with all
the sss, displacement, vgrid and whatever else.
I think I might have tried gpu and probably as usual something immediately was unsupported so reverted to cpu
to save the hassle.