Cloud detail with distance shader?

[CreechieFX]

Hi, can somebody help me with an issue I've been having?

Basically, I want to do an animation where the camera zooms down from space, through the clouds e.c.t...
My problem is that I want my clouds to look flat without much detail in them when the camera is far away (see picture 1) and then when the camera is close, I want the clouds to have more detail in them (see picture 2).

I thought the best way to achieve this was to use a distance shader to make the clouds sort of disperse into more detail as the camera moves closer. But for some reason it isn't working. What am I doing wrong?

Be gental, I very new to this 

[Tangled-Universe]

The "blend by shader" port on many nodes performs a mathematical operation on the data. It performs a multiplication.

When the value of the distance shader is 1 then the cloud fractal will remain the same, since 1 x X = X
When the value of the distance shader is 0 then the cloud fractal will disappear, since 0 x X = 0

If you use a distance-shader then you basically alter the coverage of the cloud layer over distance.
A similar setting in the cloudfractal is the offset function. This is also a multiplier where 0 means no change and >0 is more coverage and <0 is less coverage.
So you can replace the distance shader for an animated coverage-parameter.

This is what happened in your animation.

If you want more detail when getting closer up then you basically shouldn't do anything.
"just" create a cloud with enough detail and from large distance the renderer will automatically reduce detail since they aren't visible from that distance.
As soon as the camera gets closer the renderer will automatically add the detail, based on distance from camera.

A workflow is to create a start and endpoint keyframe and compare the clouds between them.

[CreechieFX]

Thanks for the reply,
I guess I'm just over complicating things then. I'll play about with the smallest detail and other settings until I get the desired effect.

Once again, thanks!

[Tangled-Universe]

You're welcome.

Just play with the fractal's scales and go for something around 15 octaves and keep smallest scale ~1 metre. That's a pretty broad range of detail.