Ray traced landscape scene thoughts

In my quest to produce better and better lego renders, I'm slowly getting sucked into a whole range of rendering things. It seems like ray tracing and terrain generation is right up my alley. The technical description, in a nutshell, for it is mathematically representing real world imagery through light tracing and fractal generation (for terrain) with less "artistic" concern or skills. Yup, that's pretty much me. I'm finding myself wondering how a certain cloud pattern I see on the way home would be mathematically represented, and what height field I would use (would it be 2 cloud layers or not). How did they (don't ask me who they is) get that cool light ray to shine through the misty cloud scene, and noticing how the snow is scattered on just one side of the mountains from a directional snow storm, and could I do that in terragen. Whoa...too freaky.

So, next, I'm looking for ways to get povray to render some of these height fields and landscapes rather than having to render them in Terragen, then match from the Terragen lighting to the pov render and mask off the model pov render (as well as shadows), which never looks "quite right" when the shadow is on a flat white floor, rather than the actual terrain, and combine all that in a post-process image alpha channel merge. It would be much easier to find a better way to render the whole scene (landscape and all) in povray. I know Forester can pull in simple model objects from povray and can render Terragen terrain files (though none of the surface map textures or clouds and cool water), but it is not nearly as good as povray or Terragen can do with the various objects separately. So, I'm looking for better ways to get believable landscape and cloud/water scenes rendered in povray. Looks like Christoph's Landscape of the Week is exactly what I want/need. Also, some more work by Jaime at The Persistance of Ignorance page. I'm going to have to spend some more time with it (and I even found some include files for believable lightening and rain effects for povray). Also, this is some pretty simplistic code sample for some random mountain chains that might work if you fix the camera in the correct place...just very specific and no clouds, or snow).