Why do the clouds not block the sun?

[reck]

The cloud density was set to 5 on the images above and you can see that some of the clouds are in front of the sun but majority still don't cover it. I thought about raising the density even more but the problem with that is the other clouds just turn into black blobs as can be seen below. Maybe turning on GI, but only in the atmosphere would do the job.

I think with enough experimenting the clouds thing can be sorted but ultimately sunsets/rises won't look very good without using some kind of post processing to increase the brightness and blooming. When I get chance i'll download cinepaint as efflux suggested to see if I can turn the disc into a bright sun but i'm hoping that TG2 will get the ability to render good looking sun at low altitudes in the future without the need for 3rd party software.

[bigben]

GI will mainly affect those areas not lit by the sun.. but it may help increase the amount of light kicking back from other clouds.

There is a whole TAB of lighting tweaks in the cloud node. Playing with the sun glow amount/power sounds more like it will give you what you want. Increasing the amount widens the spread of the glow effect (angular distance from the sun), and power affects the intensity.

The propagation settings may also be useful but I don't know enough about these to advise you.

[Volker Harun]

When increasing the density, you might want to decrease the edge sharpness antiproportional.

[Oshyan]

Just to be clear turning on Raytraced Shadows in the atmosphere or cloud quality tabs will not fix this problem. The only thing that can address it is turning off the "visible disc". As others have speculated it is a fairly simplistic effect currently. We do plan to improve this in the future and provide a more realistic visible sun effect. Glow and/or bloom effects are also something we'll be looking into although they may not make it into the initial commercial release this year.

- Oshyan

[reck]

As others have speculated it is a fairly simplistic effect currently. We do plan to improve this in the future and provide a more realistic visible sun effect. Glow and/or bloom effects are also something we'll be looking into although they may not make it into the initial commercial release this year.

- Oshyan

This is very good news