Walk With Me - The Sky
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Oh, Wow! Your here. Welcome! I assume that you have downloaded the starter sky from the first page and have it installed in Bryce 5. If you are using Bryce 4, don't despair. There is a B4 sky in the zip file. It won't be exactly the same but it will work the same.
Before we go zipping off into the land of the Deep Sky Editor, I want to cover some very basic tastes that I have. I don't know that you can ever do anything wrong in art. I am not saying that anyone does anything wrong. But, as you move along in this series of tutorials, you will notice some of my conventions. I try, in my imperfect way, to emulate mother nature for natural looking images.
A second thing that I want to mention. It is a matter purely of personal preference but I am seeing more pictures of skies showing up in Bryce. Somehow... anyway... well...
Color
a. 
Alt click
b. 
There are two things that turn me off for many images. Super-Symmetry, everything so darned perfectly aligned and super-saturated color. Both symmetry and saturated color have their places in art, but not to my taste in landscapes. Flowers and some physical manmade objects may be the exception. But for the most part, you will see that I keep my color toned down. I use the HSV ( Hue, Saturation, and Value) color model most of the time and occasionally go to HLS ( Hue, Lightness, and Saturation ). I do shift into RGB mode sometimes when I need to make a special color. All color models can make the same color but some are easier to use to get there.
Off Into the Deep Sky Editor.
a. Before we go in, lets setup our preview so we can see what sky our scene will see. This sky is intentionally bland so that we can see what does what.
b. And let's turn off the Stratus clouds so that we see only the Cumulus in the preview.
c. Click on Edit under Cumulus.
d. Click Noise and Filter. These are the two controls we are going to work with.
e. Click on the green corner of Noise.
f. 
To create clouds, I use Weird Value, Turbulence, and Fractal most of the time. I use other types of noise or combine noise types using another channel when I want to make a unique sky, mostly sunsets.
Octaves - The higher this number the smoother the edges of the clouds and the gradient. You have to increase frequency to make them smaller again. However, the increase in frequency with a high number of octaves makes for detailed content in the cloud. Octaves are like playing a chord on a piano. The more keys you strike, the more harmonic content the resulting sound has.
Frequency - Set this for the size and number of clouds you want in your scene. We can adjust the frequency outside of the Deep Texture Editor, so set the frequency for the medium amount of clouds you want. Elongate your clouds by changing X or Y. Rotate to orient the elongation.
XY Rotation - Don't forget this one. Rotate the texture to change the whole pattern of clouds you see in your scene. Often, you can change the whole feeling of an image by rotating.
Close out the noise dialog.
g. 
The Filter Dialog is where the action is. Note that the contrast ( slope of the gradient ) of your cloud is (a). Keep this number below 1.0. As you approach 1 you will start burning out areas of the cloud with pure white and blacken the bottoms of the clouds. As you approach 1 and exceed 1, lower the brightness with (b). This has its place for stormy clouds.
Exercise
Change the the Filter type to Sin(aX)+b. Set up as below. Note that with Sin(aX)+b that the contrast and brightness controls reversed. (a) is brightness and (b) is contrast.
Make this sky.
Ok Ok...
Hints
The bottom of the cloud color is controlled by the Ambient color. The rest of the cloud color is controlled by the cumulus color. Remember what I said about keeping the color saturation low. Adjust Cloud Cover ( above ), Height, Frequency and Amplitude (contrast) to your preference.
