How can I make a sphere transparent?

[AlianaAR]

I've been racking my brain and trying endless variations and just can't get this bloody ocean sphere to go transparent.

I managed to get custom shaped continents with procedural terrain using a displacement map to push up the continents I wanted from the seafloor. I inserted another sphere for the ocean. Under that flat blue in the attached image is some nicely gradually deepening underwater terrain. If I could make the ocean sphere partially transparent I'd get a nice depth falloff effect from the shoreline that would hold up nicely for low orbit views especially with an added cloud layer. You'd see that tropical blue water getting darker the farther away from the displaced continent you go...

And therein lies the problem. Noting I've tried will get that damn ocean sphere transparent. I tried a water shader, a glass shader, tried plugging them both and individually into surface layers, default layers, no layer..lol..can't get any results. I feel like it's just a matter of the correct shader plugged into the correct node of the correct type of layer...this can't be impossible for TG4 right? What am I missing here?

[Dune]

It could be the shadow of the sphere. Did you turn that off?

For such long distance shots, I would probably fake depth, which is faster to render. If you use a surface shader as the basis for your water/glass shader (fed into shadowless sphere), you can use the base color to feed the ground colors in. Replace water/glass shader by reflective shader. Maybe use the water shader only for waves (fed into surface shader input), but you can also use displacement from a no-color PF for waves.
For faked depth multiply the ground colors by blue node 'displacement to shader' as a multiplicant (is that a word?), with a color adjust to set the depths needed. I realize it might be a little vague, so I'll make you a basic sample... with room to improve of course.

[AlianaAR]

It could be the shadow of the sphere. Did you turn that off?

For such long distance shots, I would probably fake depth, which is faster to render. If you use a surface shader as the basis for your water/glass shader (fed into shadowless sphere), you can use the base color to feed the ground colors in. Replace water/glass shader by reflective shader. Maybe use the water shader only for waves (fed into surface shader input), but you can also use displacement from a no-color PF for waves.
For faked depth multiply the ground colors by a distribution shader with min depth a few meters below sealevel and some fuzzy zone, so at sea level it's pretty well white, further down it's nearing black. I also use blue node 'displacement to shader' as a multiplicant (is that a word?), with a color adjust to set the depths needed. I hope this helps.

I'll give these methods a try...thanks

*Update

Turing off Cast Shadows for the Ocean sphere had no effect. I'm not really sure how exactly to go about setting up your other suggestion. Doesn't compute, lol. I'm too new at TG to follow you. I don't understand why making an object transparent is so difficult. I love what TG can do but man, some very simple functions that are like two clicks and a slide in most other programs seem to require a degree in astrophysics to figure out...hahahaha

[Dune]

I updated my response, see above.

[AlianaAR]

I updated my response, see above.

Looks like that would work for my purposes. I'll have to see how I can integrate that into my terrain setup being I'm using a custom displacement. I'll report back if I can make it work or have more questions. Thank you very much!

[AlianaAR]

I updated my response, see above.

So I tried it and all I get is white.

[Dune]

That's probably the foam layer, of which the altitudes are not set as they should. Try disabling that.