Coming from a Lightwave animation background, I've come to expect certain visual results from volumetrics ala hypervoxels. There is a free pluging for Lightwave called OGO_Taiki that does some impressive volumetric clouds
http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~pq1a-ogs/taiki_e.html
Check out some of the animations on that page. But render times are abysmal.

Good volumetric clouds take an incredible time to render and if you're in to animation like myself, that can be very very costly. Cheats and short cuts are always welcome even if it means compositing layers from another program in After Effects.

The reason I've temporarily suspended tests on clouds is because I can not establish a good working base from which to work from. Lighting and camera motion/angle/height can make ok clouds rather useless. Since a project involves planes, I need volumes of believable clouds relatively close to the aircraft.

I don't doubt that there are shader geniuses out there that can work with what Vue has and can make it work, but out of the box environmental/volumetric formed clouds are not there.

Message edited on: 07/21/2005 22:13