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My scene is an exterior shot of a couple of industrial buildings.
Is there a way to light my scene that implies the sky is partially cloudy? I don't need to show any cloud, just tweak the "Sun" so that it looks like there are clouds in the sky.
I was thinking of using a Noise texture in some way so the sun's intensity isn't always the same (thus imitating a non constant cloud cover), but nothing I've tried so far makes any changes. Maybe there's a really easy way that I'm not seeing?

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To give the impression of a partially cloudy sky you could place a plane above your scene and use a Mix node to vary between Diffuse and Transparent shader using a Texture such as Musgrave or Noise as shown :

clouds

With the plane high above your scene it won’t be visible to the camera but will still affect the parallel rays of the sun lamp. Alternatively, if it would be visible to the camera due to the camera angle you could use a Light Path ‘Is Camera Ray’ node to make it fully transparent to the camera while still casting shadows.

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    $\begingroup$ Thank you Rich Sedman. A simple solution that works well. $\endgroup$
    – Thia
    Commented Apr 28, 2018 at 14:45

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