I’ve been looking for cloud solutions after e-Cycles failed to render RealSky clouds properly and I got no advice on BA. I did buy a couple of addons on BlenderMarket but they didn’t really help, so I turned to YouTube for tutorials on how to make my own. The best one I found was by Kent Trammell of CGCookie. I’ve always found him to be a great teacher, and this tutorial was up to par.

Clouds need a lot of light apparently, too much for the rest of the scene, so I implemented here my technique of pseudo light linking in Blender, which has worked pretty well, and provides additional compositing options as well. As I was rendering out the cloud layer I thought I could easily render a whole library of clouds to be comped into just about any image.

This scene is pretty ugly, just an default ANT landscape and a couple of clouds on a gradient background, but it was really a fairly successful technical exercise. Still took a long time to render though. I’ll have to try it out in the RTX verson of e-Cycles, although it is said that volumetrics are slow with that engine.