Hi! I want to make a planet who’s atmosphere is basically the emissive parameter. The problem is that adds opacity over the planet itself, making it look like white glowing ball where as I only want the glow around it, like saints have in religious paintings 
Look at the edge: http://i.imgur.com/QQAxN.jpg
How can I acchieve effect through the material? Would love some nodes to control intensity / color.
Alternatively, another way to get the atmosphere glow would be appreciated. Thank you!
I have not personally tried to make a texture with any depth like an atmosphere, but you might look into “bump offset”, which I think can give a second layer to your material that you could give atmospheric properties.
To get the outer edges of a round surface to be special, you should mess around with Fresnel. It creates a mask of the glancing angles of the model. I just threw together, but I’ve seen some amazing planet materials here in the forums, so search around.
&stc=1Yeah looks like a good step! Only need to make the outer part of the player more glowyyy and I have what I need 
In Project, I used three spheres in total, one earth one and two atmosphere ones. Each Atmosphere layer is slightly larger than the Earth Sphere, and the polygons face inwards. I use a Fresnel to mask the colour to the edges just like above, but then use a second inverted Fresnel to soften the edge as it fades away into space. There’s some more advanced stuff going on too but that’s the general gist of the atmosphere layers.
I used two layers simply to make the effect thicker near the earth. Could have just tweaked the material for one layer though.
Check out shader put together by Baldwin:
He put together an example for someone who asked question a while back.
EDIT:
Here is an example done by ^^ as well:
Yeah, 's is what I aim to do. Maybe less “extra” stuff like blending between illuminated and darkened sides of the planet…
For a simple Halo, you can just put a texture on a transparent plane and it a halo, or model out the halo and give it an emissive material based on a fresnel effect.
For atmospheric rendering of a planet, if you’re looking for realtime rendering, translucent layers are a surefire way to kill your performance. The two most important things are that there is a fresnel-based shading effect on the planet, and a glowing effect around the atmosphere. You can multiply the base color by the fresnel effect (lerped .5-1, so it doesn’t go black) to make the texture brighter at more oblique angles/darker in the core center, and then use a spherical model surrounding the planet with inverted normals so it only renders the backfaces, and use a fresnel shader on that to make it glow with colors. way, it doesn’t render a transparent shader-hogging layer over the planet, just the glow around the outside and it doesn’t intersect with itself. All shading information regarding anything that touches the surface of the planet would have to be done in the planet shader as there is no transparency over everything: you’d have to fake it.
