New user - a few cloud & lighting questions

[4ndrew]

Hello,

I'd like to use Terragen for some pre-painting visualization for landscapes, and particularly for those with a lot of sky. Here's an acrylic painting of mine from years ago:

https://imgur.com/z4PCgSu

Anyway, I just downloaded the demo and am trying to determine a few things.
1) How do I get clouds like the ones I've seen here?
2) How do I get the generated clouds to be closer to the camera? So far, the clouds I'm getting seem to be pretty far out toward the horizon.
3) Can we create and place various types of individual clouds? For example, a towering cumulus?
4) Is getting the earth shadow across clouds / cloud layers simply a matter of sun position?

Thanks!

[Kevin Kipper]

Terragen has three types of cloud layers: Cloud layer v2, Cloud layer v3, and Easy Clouds.  Here is the online documentation for them:

https://planetside.co.uk/wiki/index.php?title=Cloud_Layer_v2
https://planetside.co.uk/wiki/index.php?title=Cloud_Layer_v3
https://planetside.co.uk/wiki/index.php?title=Easy_Cloud

The "Cloud type" and "Model" parameters offer different types of cloud settings.  For any given cloud layer you can use the "Coverage" parameter to increase or decrease the amount of clouds.

To move the clouds closer to the camera change the Cloud layer's "Centre" value.

Here's a link to the video from the Terragen for VFX series on building towering clouds:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AtUJtctz8s

Alternatively, if you purchase a subscription to Terragen, you can access Terragen Sky and its Sky Paint tools which can help you to paint clouds where you want them to be in your project.
https://planetside.co.uk/wiki/index.php?title=Terragen_Sky_Early_Access#Sky_Paint_Workspace

To get terrain shadows on clouds you'll need to enable "Receive shadows from surfaces" for the Cloud layer.  You can find this parameter on the Quality tab.  Yes, the position of the sun contributes to this too.