How to mask clouds by sea

[Moodles]

Hi all!

I have this problem that's driving me nuts and I'm pretty sure the solution is simple. I want to limit whether certain cloud layers appear over the land or the sea when viewed from orbit.

I've tried plugging a distribution shader with altitude constraints into the final density modulator on a V3 cloud layer with a colour adjust to further boost the contrast between black and white areas of the preview. Also tried this with a surface layer and that doesn't seem to work.

Think I'm missing something really obvious, if anyone has any bright ideas that would be amazing.


Thanks in advance!

[Hetzen]

Hi welcome.

If the fractal is large enough to define a continent on your planet, then it should be large enough to keep that shape into the atmosphere, which you could invert and use for your cloud mask. Even if there is some difference in shape, it probably makes the mask slightly more natural?

If you're using a texture mask to define your sea, then that would also work on the atmosphere mask.

[Dune]

Welcome indeed. If you use color to drive displacement, it's easy to plug that through a color adjust into final density, and work the values so you have a good mask. If you use just displacement from a fractal, you have to convert displacement to scalar (blue node), then through color adjust (if needed to adjust the mask) into final cloud density.

[Moodles]

Thanks @Dune and @Hetzen that's exactly what I was looking for