Hello Matt.
Well i dont know if you and your friend power is enough to do something like EVE.
Even me and other of my friends tried and its alot of work.. and do you know the end? the project never ended...

Anyway i have some good resources of my own projects.
The atmosphere can be done using shader, see on the top left link of this page a section called WIKI, and then go to shaders and you will find it.

About the layers on the 3d max, i high recommend you to assign the difuse map as the difuse map and the other channels as secondary SKINS, or by exporting to a file and then importing to the MED model, at SKIN EDITOR...

i can design some Nebulae SkyCubes (Sky maps) for your game, for a little money income.