Strange clouds?

[bri]

I'm not sure if this is the right place or not, but does anyone know why my foreground clouds look like this? I'm tying to get back into Terragen and I really want to create some peaceful, atmospheric scenes- no huge focus on surfaces, objects, etc. I think I want to make the clouds look a little more storm-like, so more changes to them will be made, but I don't understand why the clouds have a sharp edge.

The sharpness is 2.8 and 3.8 in both Cumulus 3D layers. I need to lower the density too, because the clouds in the top left are just plain ugly. 

Any help? Thanks in advance.

[cyphyr]

Try higher density (1 to 100) and very much lower edge sharpness (0.01 to 0.001)
richard

[bri]

Thanks. I'll give that a try soon.

[bri]

I worked with the density and sharpness some more. I'm liking it a lot better, but I don't like the lit area and the rays. At their current transparency, I feel like they mess up the composition. I'd rather them not be there, or be much more opaque. I'll mess with the lighting some more and the cloud seeds to get some different cloud positions. What are you guys', and girls', opinions? I just checked out the Planetside website for the first time in awhile, and some of the example images shown are amazing!

[rcallicotte]

@xbrianx - keep at it.  Maybe try something with the inner lighting.  How high are your Atmospheric Samples?  These can be as high as 48 to 64 to make things even clearer.  You might check out the File Section, where a lot of good cloud samples are there for the learnin'.

[bri]

I don't recall the exact numbers, but my atmospheric is above 100 and both cumulus layers are around 500 I believe. I changed the seed around in the main cumulus layer and I liked the results in a quick render. I also changed the color of my secondary cumulus layer- that was originally for the low, wispy clouds, but I never really tweaked them yet- to see where they were at. I've yet to do a full render to see things more clearly. I'll definitely look in the file section, maybe I can learn some more about atmospheric settings. Thanks

[rcallicotte]

Someone should speak up here, if this is different than I understand, but 100 atmospheric is probably unnecessary.  It'll just make your render times go long.