:making clouds

is a pain - here are the approaches I'm taking so far and what I think of each - the goal is to create photo-real clouds:

Vue
has a great interface for painting ecosystems and sculpting land masses. The spectral clouds look pretty good - but the metaclouds (which can be shaped) are a little smeary for my tastes.

Terragen 2
the clouds look highly detailed but I'm not familiar with this interface for making terrains. There's a whole network/node interface I haven't tapped into at all.

Maya Fluids
I'm not sure I can get clouds to look as photorealistic as I'd like.

Video footage
nothing beats the details in footage but means picking through and selecting only the ones with matching camera viewpoint.

Framestore and The Mill produced a couple of commercials that have very nice clouds in them:
British Airways: Clouds
The Mill - Mercedes "Clouds" Commercial

what I've learned so far:
- render times for software-generated clouds are going to be laborious (if not ridiculous)
- each shot must layer clouds: background + mid-ground + foreground clouds + 2d comped mist.
- aesthetically, clouds actually have lots of crisp detail in them (and it's these details that can give a sense of scale.)
- trees and other vegetation look more like bumpy, fuzzy moss when viewed aerially which makes me wonder if I actually need to manually place vegetation on the terrain or if it would be a waste of time. Individual vegetation may not be viewable.
- canyon shots of clouds: foreground layer of clouds that obscure camera, disappears and opens up into an open space where the next layer of clouds is the far background cloud layer.
- lightning: one or multiple light sources in clouds - animate increase in intensity.

what I'm going to do next:
- going to render the most detailed cloud I can (still).
- see if it is possible to animate a cloud evolving.