Hello there!
I'm fairly new to Terragen and can't figure out how to isolate clouds from the rest of the scene. I'm looking into creating a layered sky system for a game that would need the background atmosphere and the clouds separated from each other, in order to accommodate independently rendered stars and auroras. These effects are both animated shaders, and for obvious reasons need to be behind the clouds, so isolating the clouds from the background atmosphere is a must. (and combining everything into one normal skybox texture unacceptable)
Now onto my problem. The obvious answer would be to uncheck Enable Primary on the atmosphere layer, but as per the title this gets rid of any contribution the atmospheric haze and such has on the clouds' final color. Another solution would be to do that, make the clouds white, and then use that as an alpha mask for the full rendered sky with clouds, and render the atmosphere without clouds separately. However this is less than ideal, because it means changing the properties of each cloud layer every time I want to create the mask, increasing render time due to having to render two extra images, and also losing out on some of the fine detail in the shapes of the clouds.
So the ideal solution would be to have Terragen natively render the clouds without the background atmosphere, or essentially only rendering the atmosphere if the raytrace hits something that isn't the actual scene background. But I can't seem to figure out a way to do this? And the more I investigate it, the more I'm worried it's not possible.
Any advice or suggestions would be appreciated.