HORIZON. (04/01/16)

Ever since I started with a world sky and clouds I have had endless frustration locating the horizon where I wanted it. I woke this morning at 0430h and the solution had occurred to me whilst I slept. This is both exciting and a little depressing, I can remember a time when my dreams were full of salacious scenarios involving Uma Thurman. Every cloud is silver lined.

This is the Node Tree that generates and controls the clouds and also applies the sky or atmosphere. All I had to do was add the bits in red highlighter. This  job is now perfect and I can clean up the Tree. The bits lit up yellow are supposed to be there, they are keyframes.

There is still an awful lot wrong with this but I am reasonably happy. The water is now much better as I used Bump and Noise instead of the Wave Texture. You will see in the second scene that the flag is a bit droopy. I use a wind force and it has to be at about 400 thingies to make a flag blow whereas the reeds only need 1 or 2 thingies, they just get blown under the water at higher forces as they flatten against the disc they are modelled on. In the last scene I popped the flag on a different layer and now I can have two wind speeds; it transpires that I can't parent forces to objects on the same layer, the virtual fan affects everything. The reeds are not very good I'll have another go at them. I am pleased with the land but still not happy with the texture. The grass and rock are supposed to be tileable but you can see banding. I'll see if I can dream a solution to the problem.
I have several things to do/learn and the other day noticed something called Boids. I looked it up and it is a particle control system that mimics flocking, targeting and other things. I don't understand all it can do, to be honest I don't understand half the words. I am considering having two or three flocks of a thousand birds or maybe fish and making them swirl about by animating a target for them.
It's still raining hard so after I have walked the dogs, I'll try and make my bird flap properly and if I can't I'll make a fish as they only have to wriggle a bit.
Have fun.
PS. I forgot to mention that scenes 1 and 3 are test renders at 50% resolution so a bit blurry. The little fireflies in scenes 1&2 are caused by my forgetting to add some clamp. Please pretend they are midges.