The clouds especially looks to fake, and using a HDRI is in my opinion necessary.
But when making a animation it would be just beautiful with a more realistic sky so you can show the changing shadows on the buildings when the sun moves across the sky.
Different presets could be a nice feature to speed up the process 
The clouds especially looks to fake, and using a HDRI is in my opinion necessary.
But when making a animation it would be just beautiful with a more realistic sky so you can show the changing shadows on the buildings when the sun moves across the sky.
Different presets could be a nice feature to speed up the process
I do agree that low clouds are very fake looking. I usually turn them off and keep the Cirrus clouds which look better.
I always loved how Vue Ozone Cloud Factory rendered clouds in their software, which I am pretty sure is discontinued?
The clouds do change the amount of sunlight hitting buildings as the time changes - you can simulate this by changing the Latitude/Longitude settings within the atmosphere settings. (The amount of cloud needs to be quite high to see any effect). In previous versions they used to change a lot more with the time of day: if you ran a day/night cycle video it would look like it was flashing because the clouds were moving so fast.
I think that these settings (Lat/Long) should be saved with a time stamp and that would give you the movement speed/direction of the clouds as time passed... but there are a few other things that could be tweaked first 
(Clouds look painted)
Reality-captured HDRIs have of course the best quality since they are as close to real as it gets. You can get many of them for free at sources like those: https://hdrihaven.com/
Animated, reality captured HDRI skies are a challenging topic. It's a bit unlikely that this will happen soon. There are also more realistic approaches to cloud rendering (like the one from Vue) but they are very far away from real time, when we talk about animations etc.
Reality-captured HDRIs have of course the best quality since they are as close to real as it gets. You can get many of them for free at sources like those: https://hdrihaven.com/
Animated, reality captured HDRI skies are a challenging topic. It's a bit unlikely that this will happen soon. There are also more realistic approaches to cloud rendering (like the one from Vue) but they are very far away from real time, when we talk about animations etc.
I can only imagine it's a difficult task, but e.g. Lumion seems to have found a way if I'm not wrong!?
If you're talking about their "Realskies", this is 100% identical to going to https://hdrihaven.com/ and picking a skybox. They just ship it with the product, but it's still not animated. It is technically not impossible to play-back 360° HDRI videos of a sky, but it's challenging.
Vue Ozone has been retired from the market but e-on software still offer this cloud creation solution via their professional subscription package.
Apparently cloud elements generated with the e-on application can be imported via OpenVDB.
I wonder if this OpenVDB capability is something the SketchUp software should provide or whether Enscape may work out a way to import OpenVDB files in the future. (Or even better, add a cloud collection to the Asset Library)
More realistic realtime clouds are definitely doable, it's likely just a question of resources. https://kotaku.com/the-clouds-…truly-next-gen-1726461687
Right now I'd say the lighting is quite realistic, it's the repetitive shapes that are unconvincing. Are there procedural cloud packages you can license or purchse for use in Enscape? No idea how that works...
If you're talking about their "Realskies", this is 100% identical to going to https://hdrihaven.com/ and picking a skybox. They just ship it with the product, but it's still not animated. It is technically not impossible to play-back 360° HDRI videos of a sky, but it's challenging.
Yes Lumion Realskies is just a HDRI image, even they're very nicely integrated, maybe something to consider.
But their generated skies are quite nice too, which gives some advantages when it comes to animations.
I have used Lumion, but like Enscape a lot and I'm sure you're doing a big and good job to implement as many features as possible within the resources you have. Maybe just more variety to the clouds can do the trick? Like PowerTower said, the "repetitive shapes" of the clouds makes the sky look off compared to what's Enscape is capable of.
Some unity back-yard programming that seems to produce better results than we currently have: I'm sure that the Encape team could do better
UP
