Procedural sunset with a chance of clouds

I was messing around with the Cycles sky texture and wondered if I could add procedural clouds to it, this is what I came up with:


Clearly they could be better, but it was still fun. They have fairly realistic coloring except with the sun all the way down.

Here is the blend:

proceduralsunset.blend (81.3 KB)

That is really good

Stunning…

Not exactly photo-real, but probably good enough to use in reflections… good work!

Had a quick look at real clouds and notice that the sky terminator effect (change of color) occurs lower than the cloud one. So that the sky turns from blue to orange lower while the clouds are orange much higher up.

Also there seems to be some incident light modeling on even the wispiest clouds.

Excuse me, 3pointEdit, are you telling that these pictures are Blender renders?!?
Could you please post a blend file? I’d love to study it.

Lol they’re pics

No they are just photos I found to compare. You’ve done a great job I was just offering advice.

Have you been drinking ?

what, you mean today? no?

I was not in any way trying for photorealistic :slight_smile:

My main point with the exercise was actually to figure out how I would get the clouds to look like they are on a plane receding into the horizon despite being mapped onto a sphere (the background shader.) This took me a while.

I figured it could be of some help to others trying something similar, so I posted the blend.

I really like your video JuanJose :slight_smile:

3pointEdit: I was trying to get a better cloud color with the sun on or below the horizon, but I couldn’t figure out a way to sample an average color and apply it to the edge of the clouds. So I gave up :wink:

Yes I have been tryiong to make an average colour sample in nodes too, but found that I could not blur the image enough to make it homogenous. I even tried shrinking the image down to 1 pixel, Blender does not like doing that.

I thought it was a very clever setup. the way the 2 world colours overlap to create the look of haze on the horizon.