The second Earth Globe model in my newest models. This one has the landmass of earth SEPARATE from the ocean. So the Land is an object called GLOBE (land) and it is a polygonally modelled piece of geometry. I used a world map reference and plotted every single point of the outline of the continents, then cleaned up the polys and verts then removed the ocean and extruded the land mass up with the SHELL modifier. You can increase or decrease this level of extrusion for your style purposes with the 'outer amount' in the shell modifier still applied to GLOBE (land) object. Making the model very versatile. The land is linked to the OCEAN object, so to spin the globe around, use the OCEAN object.

The materials used were simple Blinn materials, so you can really ramp up the creativity of the model with your own textures and procedural maps for a really stylised look (as in the example renders, the file scenes of those are not included in the files) 'Green' and 'Blue' are the two materials used in the scene, with the 'white' material for the frozen infinity plane shape used as a background. The light is a normal skylight, with the lighting setup being mental ray with some final gather, but the file renders very quickly, on my very slow machine, it averages 90s a frame.

'Different' example uses Mental Ray Arch & design plastic and mental ray A&D glass material. And the plastic has 'rounded corners' effect on (found in 'special effects' panel in Mental Ray A&D settings. So you don't even need to bother with Turbo/Mesh smooth to get a nice, classy rounded edge.