Mist & Water Vapour

Very often the addition of some mist, water vapour or smoke can add to the atmosphere of an image. Several people have asked me how I do mine - here's how.

Here is a simple scene consisting of a sky and sea.

Create a sphere and enlarge it to about 250 Bryce Units in size. Lower the sphere so that only the top part is visible above the ground or water plane as shown to the left.

I use a sphere with a volumetric cloud texture applied. The reason for using a sphere instead of a volumetric slab is that it renders considerably faster than a slab.
Apply the Volumetric Cloud texture called Blue Smog Slab Clouds it's on the top row, second from the right.
If you rendered at this point you would see something like the image to the left.

This is not the effect I'm after.
Enter the Materials Editor [M] and make the following changes:
Set Diffusion and Ambience to 100.
Set Fuzzy Factor to 300.
Set Quality/Speed to 50%.

Adjust the base density according to the effect you require.
Here the base density is set to 50.

Below left the base density is set to 40.

Below right the base density is set to 60.

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