In this test animation I created an earth model in Maya 2011, following the 3D Buzz Maya Fundamentals tutorial. Along with texture and bump maps, this simulation has two shading networks that control day and night incandescents, which simulates turning night lights off when the sun hits and turns them on when it's dark. There are various shading node switches including multipliers, set-range, blends, averaging and more. This simulation also uses masks for transparency in the cloud layer and a mask to prevent the land masses from shining like the ocean, as the main earth material is a blinn which is reflective.
