The Tips in detail

 "Cloudbusting"

Doing your landscapes you will for sure come accross the problem of how to do the sky, especially how to do the clouds. To get this done you can go several ways, depending on your skill, time and patience.

The main problem doing clouds is that they are of irregular shape, are translucent, having colors, don't have a constant oppacity, are not solid and do shapechanging "at will". So before you try to make your clouds from scratch, you should have a look at how clouds look like and how they do behave. Keep in mind that real clouds - at least on earth - mainly consist of water and therefore are colored white or light grey by default. All the colors you can see on clouds at sunrise or sunset, during storms or other fancy weathers are coming from atmospheric effects.

Have an eye at the following:

• From what angle does the sunlight hit the clouds?
• How many heaps of clouds are there? Big heaps are usually not standalone but often come in groups with smaller ones.
• How dense are the clouds (This actually means how much water is in the cloud. The more water inside the more oppacity / density the cloud has and the bigger it grows but also the less altitude the cloud reaches.)
• How strong is the wind blowing? Is the wind constant or changing? More wind generally means the clouds will flatten and widen and the shape will change more often and intense.
• Clouds do cast shadows onto themselves as well as onto the scenery.
• Clouds are tinting the light that passes through them depending on their density. Where they are hit from light they get some kind of selfillumination and / or glow.
• What time of the day is it in your scenery? Dusk or dawn skies and clouds tend to be darker than around highnoon.

One way to get clouds is by using an image of a sky (as I did in the Sat Dish image.) Using an image of a skyline as a backdrop (environment: background) is the easiest way to get started. Cons are:

• You can't easily animate such an image.
• In most cases the perspective of the skyline can't be modified to fit your scenery.
• The resolution of the image used as a backdrop in most cases doesn't fit to your needs when rendering the scenery.

If you are out to do your own sky, there are various ways you can go. You might paint your sky completely on your own by using ie. Photoshop. Else you might want to try combustions. Or maybe using FreePyro from Cebas turns out to be usefull to you. Perhaps you can afford one of those tools using hypervoxels. Other usefull "you-gotta-pay-for" plugins are Outburst, Pyrocluster, Afterburn. The main pro for using plugins is that you'll get fully animatable clouds. The main con is that you might have to spend some money, time and patience to learn these tools...

If you want to do clouds only by using tools that came along with your 3DSM you might try the clouds by using various noisemaps (diffuse, oppacity...) on a large dome resting above your scenery. The more (dome-)layers you use, the more depth and realism you get. Using Combustions within Atmospherics may result in what you are out for, but tuning them needs time and patience, since many parameters you will want to change can't be changed using the default combustions.