I had an opportunity to do this above the clouds - merging outer space kind of matte painting under the supervision of Stanislaw Marek. I started with a quick concept using rough images to get a feel of what direction we want to go for and then I started bashing clouds in clarisse to get a specific look which client had approved. So this ended up being a 70% 3d solution using clarisse and a paintover in photoshop to add to the realism. This is the first time I used 3d solution for clouds at such a big level...so it was definitely fun working on it. I hope you guys like it.