Attached Link: http://www.velarde.com/refinery

Hello everybody: I've done some tweaking on the refinery. I was having some problems with the animation (the still looked fine). http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=268940&Start=13&Sectionid=6&WhatsNew=Yes The cloud objects were jittering and the clouds below were looking bad at the horizon line.... Litst suggested to use 4D clouds but, they just didn't work for me... Has anybody made them work correctly for them..? The manual was not very usefull, in fact it was very discouraging. Here's a quote: "4D Clouds 4D Clouds creates animated volumetric clouds. There are a few tricks to getting them to look right. For example, if bands are appearing in your clouds, you porbably need to increase the numbers of sections Section Controls. If your clouds look banded, you will need multiple sections. Alternatively, you can increase the sizes, then scale the cloud in the Properties panel. This may not always work. If the banding is bad, do the following" And then it goes on about doing a work around to make them look good.. which I couldn't. The clouds primitive look very nice on stills but there's another bug that makes them jitter during animations.. so scratch that on out, too. So what I ended doing was using fog objects. They still need some work but at least they don't jitter, so I guess I'll ve using that one too. To get rid of the crappy horizon line (the clouds in the bottom were jittering there two) I had to crank up the rendering quality AND render at double size, and then resize it down (kind of the same work around than with the light cones). It takes a while but you can make it work... I wanted to share this with you, besides showing you the refinery, because of the previous Skydome post. I was wondering why would you experiment with a big sphere and texture maps?.. when you can use the "Sky" scene effect. It look nicer and it can also be animated. Maybe slower... : ) I agree I was about to go with the skydome alternative but now I solved my problem. and myabe you can use it as an alternative to the other method... We'll I guess that's enough, thanks to everyone that helped with suggestions, I'll keep you posted with the updates if you wish

The built-in Atmosphere effect is neat but really limited meteorologically. I'm just trying to create a wider variety of background cloudscapes, not necessarily limited to ground-based views. Not there yet, but progressing. Your animation is really cool. Volumetrics are the only way to get full-bodied clouds. I tried various surface shader strategies on meshes, all looked crappy. You could pack a lot more fog/cloud objects into that scene for dramatic effect, the camera track punching through the clouds to reveal the closeup detail only near the end. Have you tried duplicating fog puffs on top of each other for increased density? What keeps that refinery in the air, by the way? And what is it refining? SMcQ

What keeps that refinery in the air, by the way? And what is it refining? Mmh... all very good questions.... I would also like to know... : ) I guess they are mining some rare gas in the atmosphere (maybe the yellow clouds themselves...?) As for the method of propulsion I was thinking of Sirius Cybernetics' Improbability Drive, or something ... : ) Actually this is a personal proyect that I like to do to see what I can do with Carrara... so I can plan for workarounds, bugs, etc... so when I use it in a Real project there will be no surprises... or at least less : ) By the way, I like your suggstions for the clouds... Make more of them and hide the refinery... You do realize that the texture in the bottom are clouds from the "sky" effect... not a ground infinite plane...? It just look weird because we are seeing it from above and not a ground view... Thanks for the comments!