Tricky things, clouds. All my previous experiments with media clouds have been
slow, unrealistic, and fiddly. Gilles' df3 technique is sly, and his example
images beautiful. However, I've always wanted a cloud macro that will 'just
work' in a scene, without the need for external tools and without the memory
consumption of hi-res df3s.

This image is a decent result from a set of macros I've recently been developing
- it rendered in ~30 mins on my 1.8GHz macbook, which I think is very good for
'pure' object-pattern-based media (this is without aa - unfortunately it takes
a lot longer with aa).

Using a blob as the pattern template makes the rendering much quicker, and
lowering the media aa_level is also a great speedup I'd never tried before. My
basic cloud macro currently has 11 parameters, which sounds like a lot, but this
includes location and size, turbulence, solidity and so on, which makes tweaking
a lot easier. I've also got a quality parameter, the lowest setting of which
just uses the solid blob objects - very handy for shape and location checks
(and also looks pretty surreal!).

Anyway, this is a wip so I'll post more interesting results as I get them...

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