Quote - That is rather incredible.
Randomizing the cloud size more would greatly improve the realism I think, although one of the biggest problems with an overall procedural technique like this is really being able to predict what will appear and where. What I mean is, when I'm taking a photo or composing a painting I look for specific shapes that will lead the eye around the image. In this case I might be looking for cloud formations that nicely "frame" key features in the fore or mid ground, or which particularly add a sense of depth by leading the eye into the distance.
This is difficult with procedurals, unless you can define specific areas in which the effect will take place.
In Vue (when I had it running in V5) I could place specific cloud objects (cuboids whose final rendered formations would be procedural) where I needed them, and had more random and lighter higher level cloud formations as a general backdrop to these. Might be a direction worth considering.

I'm very impressed though - yes, render time(?)

Gotcha. I've seen Vue's clouds - beautiful stuff - what I aspire to do although I doubt I can get it that good.

I'm still working out the principles of how this works. The interesting about it is that the sense of depth does not come from geometry, although the placement does. Meaning, if instead of a full 360 environment sphere, you used the shader on a simple rectangle, you could position it anywhere you want and that's where you'd see the clouds. By changing the algorithm to confine it to just one puff or some other desired shape, the individual rectangle can be dialed to produce something specific, and by positioning the rectangle in the scene, to put that in a specific place.

Note that positioning the prop would only control the viewing angle where the puff would appear. Its actual 3d look and it's apparent distance from the viewer would be from the shader. You could put the prop just 20 feet away from the camera, but the cloud would still appear to be a few miles away. Think of it as a little window into another world where there is a cloud perfectly framed by the window.

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