Very cloudy works wonders in this picture!

Nice monkey pic.*br**br*btw, you misspelled "smokey" as "smoky" which is why there's no mist effect. Note, though, that if you got the mist, you wouldn't see the clouds above since they'd be obscured by the global mist.

oops...my mistake. "smoky" and "smokey" are both fine. I'll add in "smoky" !

i'm still trying to figure out the progression of intensity for the atmospheric effects.*br*smoke * steam * fog * mist * haze, (haze is the least, I assume?) and how they interact with sky, colors, textures, etc. lot's of interesting variables!

Yes, that's basically the progression, with smoke being the thickest and haze being the thinnest. You can say "very" "extremely" "moderately" etc to modify any of them. The ordering is all someone arbitrary and still needs to be calibrated a bit I think. *br**br*Since the sky is at infinity, you won't see the sky with any of them, since even a very low mist factor will eventually eliminate all the light if added from the camera position to infinity. Likewise, there will be no direct light from the sun either, since it's at infinity. So the only light in the scene will be a default ambient light and the camera light. Because of this, I find it useful to put extra light sources into scenes with global mist-type atmospheric effects. Otherwise the shading looks fairly flat.*br**br*Note: There are actually two parameters bundled into one with these atmospheric effects. The first is the thickness or "extinction" factor which determines how much light gets through. The second is "albedo" which determines how much scattering there is. So smoke has a lower albedo, since it tends to be darker and steam has a higher albedo since it tends to be brighter. The color of the fog/mist/smoke is multiplied by the albedo. Again, all somewhat arbitrary. *br**br*

excellent. useful info, thanks. *br*some sort of a system would be useful, of course. but once you get the principle, it makes sense.