I have been playing with volumetric clouds scenes after the recent post about doing something similar than Bryce. It is still more difficult to do in Vue but I guess I got a good start. A key to this is to remove 'cast shadow' from the sunlight and to use very large spheres with volumetric textures at large scale.

I'm impressed agiel!...especially with the flow of darker ones to the distance ones. There seem to be a faint line on the upper left side and lower right corner...guess they are the edge of the sphere used. But this is great!...have them critters wings partially in the clouds and your image is a WINNER! Thanks for sharing. Bill Tesign

I did that quickly last night and rendered it overnight. It needs a lot of tuning (for the sea and the island especially). Is this what you had in mind with your earlier post ?

Wow, that is great!! :D

Looks awesome! :) Laurie

Here is a better variation. I spent more time on the clouds material. This one uses a volumetric atmosphere and the 'grey smoke' material from the 'volumetric' library.

And here is a mini tutorial about the scene itself. I found the best way to control the light is to place the sunlight behind the camera and just orient it up or down. The shadow of the sunlight works well in a volumetric atmosphere but has to be disabled in a regular atmosphere. Intersections between cloud-spheres create artefacts - the should be kept outside of the field of vue. Finally, you can better tune the aspect of the clouds using the 'light' control in the atmosphere panel. Especially the amount of sunlight vs ambient and the exposure.

Oh boy, this has lots of possibilities! Thanks for sharing the setup! :D

Thanks for this, agiel ! It will be very usefull to me... when finally, Vue4 will be released in French version ! :-) Maybe it's just me, but I really prefer the mood of the first version...

"Is this what you had in mind with your earlier post ?"....sort of Agiel, but you certainly did a great job on your first image for the "among clouds" effect with Vue 4. I was actually referring to how it is easily done with Bryce. I believe it can be done(to a certain extend) with Vue 4 but its a real tough call. Like you mentioned, its not easy as Bryce can do it, which is straight forward. What I see Vue 4 lack here is "Volumatric Plane" and that is what Bryce has to get the volumetric cloud preset working with it. Anyway, hope e-on is looking at Bryce and have what it takes to make nice volumetric clouds in the next version. I have attached another image of the clouds that I would love to make without all the hassle Vue 4 has to get by with. This is just a straight forward placing of 4 volumetric plane (one place almost horizontal -lower)to get different variation of thick volumetric clouds. Thanks for all your work out agiel. Its nice to know what the competition has that can improve another product. Hats off to Bryce on this one.

To imitate a "volumetric plane," have you tried using a nearly-flattened cube with a volumetric material? That's where I'd start, methinks. :)

Thanks Varian. Been there thru it all (increase density, fuzziness, scaling, boost quality etc...) but in vain. Flatten the cube as to get a "volumetric plane"...somehow, you get things more transparent to a point, most of the time you get nothing. One thing though, if you are trying this out, look at the preview window, it's what we expected but the rendering is different. Not sure its Vue or me :( Anyway, I believe e-on approach to "Volumetric" method is very different. Do let me know if any of you have good results...preferrably without the artifacts stuff.