Sea cloud formations from orbit

[Moodles]

Hi guys,

Been working on an orbital shot for a while now, trying to learn Terragen from the ground up.
Pretty happy with where this one is going but would be great to hear what you guys think, what improvements could be made and if you have any thoughts on how to tackle the various challenges.
To that end I've attached an image with some thoughts an art direction going forwards.

Also, the image has been tweaked in post, can share the original if needed.

[luvsmuzik]

Well done!

[WAS]

Looks pretty decent so far. Are you using the reflective/glass shader for roughness for the water?

For the cloud shadows you may try upping the edge sharpness and density slightly to cut through the atmosphere some more.

You could try mixing together density fractals for varied shapes. For wispy tops you may need to get more complicated isolating the tops. Or maybe you could try inverting the tweaks profile with a wispiness and softness setting.

[Hannes]

That look great already. I'd say you should stack some cloud layers on top of each other. Say if you have a base cloud layer like in your image at a height of 3000 meters for example, you could copy and paste the layer, move the second one up to 4000 meters maybe and reduce the coverage a bit, while increasing the density. Thus you'll get a softer base with more pronounced tops. As far as I know this only works with V2 clouds, since V3 clouds seem to have a problem with several layers. I may be wrong, but I think Matt mentioned some time ago, that V3 clouds don't correspond well with each other.
V2 clouds render faster, and look pretty good for this kind of orbital images.

[Dune]

You could probably also do this in one layer with an altitude mask (distribution shader) and mix/add a lower, softer layer bottom version (smoothing filter) with the hard tops.

For cloud avenues try mixing in an X (or Z) stretched, slightly (which is relative from this height of course) warped mask locally.

[Moodles]

Tweaked the clouds and masks a little, generating the attached....

@WAS cheers dude, your insight is a thing of beauty, haha. In the end I opted for tweaking the atmosphere settings which helped the water shader a bit then did the rest in post, glass shader is still planned, I'm just being lazy till the clouds are done as I CBA developing the noise patterns for wave and wind patch until then 

Edge sharpness is probably the way to go, I actually went the other way with density as I find higher tends to result in more light bleed/creep within the cloud defeating the impression of weight and density, maybe upping the colour albedo or occlusion and bounce could work.

Definitely down for throwing some density fractals at it for further detail. Had thought to isolate the top of the clouds with a reduced density/colour adjusted cumulonimbus mask but the wispiness and softness setting has me intrigued. Only obstacle I can see is that the stretching required for a tapered billow would leave a linear curve from base to tip whereas ideally it'd need to be similar to a quint for realism.


@Hannes thanks man, definitely looking to introduce more layering to the clouds, in particular cirrus as it adds the impression of motion to the image. I'm trying to keep it all as one V3 layer as the V2 clouds always felt a little flat to me. Density is definitely an area to look at but as i mentioned in my reply to WAS, it seems that higher density results in unrealistic light bleed/creep within the cloud

@Dune definitely the goal, hadn't considered the smoothing option for lower clouds but now that you mention it I really like the idea.
I think the avenues definitely need some work, I've tried the X/Z stretch option but it leads to the impression that the wind blows in one direction globally, and when applied to any kind of warped noise you get these really ugly density build-ups in curves. So what I'm trying (with some success) is to use a warp effect on perlin noise to avoid curve build-up and then feed that into a warp shader for a more natural look.