Aye, Damia, some quick answers... For one, I try not to se the Skylab clouds any more. I feel like I've done everything with them possible, even after playing with Alvin's kickass skies I still want to explore new stuff. In this scene (the mountain/cloud scene) I used a huge sphere surrounding the scene, and a volumetric material which I tweaked heavily from one of VanLippe's cloud materials... So, the scene actually has an atmosphere. If I turned the density on the Volume material up to 100, the scene would be completely white, or damn close. Volumetric materials offer more flexibility both in the material itself, and in the shading modes. I'll post a screenshot of the scene and the cloud material I used, if you're interested. But, to sum it up, Volumetric materials have a Quality vs. Render Time slider. The lower the value on this slider, the faster it will render, but at an obvious quality hit. These images (except the flower) were all tests of how the clouds would look if I let it render longer, basically...