Cloudy Mountain

[Falcon]

One of those sudden inspirations. I wanted a mountain top with clouds around it. Thought about how to do it. Then came to the conclusion that a few distance shaders would do the trick, both in placing the mountain at the exact spot I needed it and at creating a cloud ring.

This is the first render, very rough, but it shows the basic concept. Now some more clouds, ground details, etc. and it has the potential to come close to the image in my mind.

[Henry Blewer]

If you used a large scale power fractal to drive the color of the distance shader, then you might get more variation with the cloud ring (x and z distances).

[Falcon]

Not sure what exactly you mean.

Here's my node setup:

[Henry Blewer]

The power fractal/s would be inputs into the distance shader (I think). This would cause the clouds to breakup and elongate around the mountain top.

[dandelO]

I'd just reduce the coverage of the cloud density fractal. It works the same way that colour offset works in a power fractal. You'd most likely get a nice varied cloud by reducing this so that the cloud doesn't cover the entire distance masked area, there'd be no round edges from distance boundaries.

Adding a fractal to the input would still mean that the effects of that fractal are cut off along the mask borders, giving a solid, round shape, a little apparent in this first image already.

[Falcon]

Yes.

I'm currently experimenting with other options, like using a Distribution Shader to remove the mountain tops from the cloud layer, but so far the results aren't what I'm expecting.