Reduce God Rays without losing Blue Sky - How?

[D.A. Bentley (SuddenPlanet)]

I know we have discussed many times how to reduce God Rays, by reducing Haze and Blue Sky Density in the Atmosphere node, but what if you want the blue sky to stay?
Reducing Haze alone does not get rid of God Rays, and so reducing Blue Sky Density is the next step, but then you lose your blue sky (becomes black).
I know I could put in a blue gradient background bitmap in the background node, but is that the only way?

Feature Request:  It would be nice to have an option to set a Z-Order for each cloud layer and Atmosphere node so you could basically render with some built in compositing options.  This would allow you to render cloud layers and atmosphere in one pass, but specify the order in which they render/overlap.  So basically this would allow you to have the atmosphere look you want, without all the God Rays by setting the atmosphere to render first and in the very back layer, then various cloud layers can render on top.  Just an idea to save time, and allow people that don't have compositing software to achieve the results they want.

Thanks,

Derek

[Matt]

If you were to comp the clouds over the top of the atmosphere it wouldn't stop god rays from forming, they would just be in the empty spaces between clouds. I also think clouds near the horizon would appear quite unrealistic because they need distance atmosphere to partially obscure them. However, if this is what you want, I suggest enlarging your atmosphere so that most of the atmosphere is above your clouds and very little is below. You can do this by increasing the "exp heights" on the Height tab. The defaults are 2000 and 8000 for haze and bluesky respectively. You could try increasing these by 10x to 20000 and 80000. Then reduce your haze densities by the same factor, i.e. divide your haze densities by 10. This should give you a background sky that looks almost the same as it did before, but the clouds will have less atmosphere in front of them. Another way to achieve this is to make your clouds smaller and at a lower altitude - that would probably be a more realistic way to produce this effect.

[D.A. Bentley (SuddenPlanet)]

Thanks Matt!  I tried this technique and it works great!!!

-Derek