The age-old question arises... SO, let's see everyone's latest techniques on skies and stuff! Here's a new technique of mine : 1 spotlight, 1 volumetric plane, no sun, but the atmosphere IS on. There are some off-screen artifacts due to the spotlight's falloff, but some radial-light tweaking might fix that. No postwork.

Beautiful work, and nice technique thanks for sharing.

My technique is to have sheres with volumetrics and then set each color in the skylab.The clouds are also modified in the phases.Think I have the terminology right.If not Look at the pic and this is what I do

skylab, no cumulus,deep texture (phase 514)

Here's the same sky, but with a different material applied to the spotlight, and a different Master Shadow color (blue). Renders in just under an hour, at this resolution, so it's unacceptable for animation.

dBGrafix, I'm curious about yuor technique, perhaps you could post a screenshot of your scene? I THINK I have it figured out, but not quite...?

I also added a plane and dropped it quite low with silver metal mat.

I like using the balls for clouds

We must be on the same wavelength, I've been working on this too! this is a volumetric slab + skylab stratus and haze in other words, the same as shadowdragonlord (man, that's a long handle....), but without the radial ;) I'm using this one for my challenge entry

I'd like to hear the stats on Nesibus' render. Bryce preset material? Wireframe screen shot? Render time?

Default Bryce sky, tweaked default Bryce volumetric mat on a single sphere, sun is the only light source. I could have rendered it with a higher volume quality to get rid of the evident grain, but was in a hurry. AgentSmith

Nice work, AS... Perhaps the "Sky Integration" feature would yield cloud-shadows a little closer to those the skylab is producing, as well?

Good question, didn't occur to me, I'll have to try it out... AS