HDRI for lights+sky.

Actually, the cloudy sky is what first caught my eye....looks more like real clouds than almost anything I've seen before in Carrara. The fog-thing isn't behaving right. Living here in the SF Bay Area, I often see the sea fog rolling in over the hills and filling up the valleys. It behaves like a thick fluid, really. It's rather spectacular to see.

How should the cloud be shaped? More drippy? tendrally? many little clouds instead of one?

Liquid. Around here, it literally fills up a valley then spills over into the next one.

I like your Alpine scene. Such a mountain mist-cloud should be much larger in relation to the small features of the slope, and it should have irregular opacity, and a blue ambient.

Good pics to explore. Those pics shows that the clouds reflects the sunlight in several layers. You can see greyish in the shadow side. I think it is more of 'Transcluence' effect. It is a good start to explore in transcluence effect for the realistic clouds. The first image posted in this thread. It looks more like fog to me. If you want clouds like the dual pics in post #6, then the volumetric should be more thicker, chunky, and reflective. Where did you get the shader from, maybe I can try to play with it to find varities for different realistic cloud effects.

In the pic to the left you can see that the low clouds also follow the topography of the land over which they pass. Of course its one thing to understand what to work for and quite another thing to get it in a render! :-)

"Of course its one thing to understand what to work for and quite another thing to get it in a render! :-)" --yes, that's the trick. Thanks for the reference photos, Ed! Searched around on google a bit but nothing as nice as yours. Had the idea in my head but couldn't visualize it accurately. That's exactly what I needed! thank you! holly

Mind to tell us where you got the fog from? Is it from plug in or Carrara's volumteric?

"but my Primivol cloud looks a little dirty..." as he says in his original post. So, must be Juliens Primoval plug-in, yes? A great plug-in by the way! And great support from him. When I had a hard drive crash, he resent my serial numbers and provided me the links to the latest version.

Try turning off the self shadowing and maybe putting a little blue in the color. I think all you need to do is color match the cloud to your background. -Kix