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You are correct, Blender does not include a proper sunlight/atmosphere setup. The answer is this rather inexpensive add-on: Physical Starlight and Atmosphere https://gumroad.com/l/PSaA I use this, and I love it! Work in both Cycles and Eevee. In Eevee you get real-time results in the viewport. The latest version offers support for binary suns. The upcoming update will allow for realistic planet rendering and real-time oceans, as well as procedural clouds - everything interacts physically correct. The developer looked at Lumion, Vray, Octane, and other apps to create a realistic sunlight/atmosphere system for Blender. The result is quite impressive. This is real-time in the viewport using Eevee: Features: Most versatile outdoors lighting setup so far (probably in any software) Physical stars (included in v1.1) Visually accurate mathematical model Made for PBR and HDR workflow Fully procedural - can simulate unlimited number of sky conditions Super high dynamic range, use with tone mapping (filmic, or aces) Variable sun size and brightness Earth shadow (belt of Venus) Accurate sun radiance model based on blackbody radiance theory Unlocked viewer position - can simulate conditions at any altitude Cheaper than having a full HDD with high resolution HDRIs for every possible sky condition Rapid results - one click away to a beautiful render Consistency - sunlight, sky and fog share the same code and parameters Performance - load and render faster than HDRI textures Small memory footprint Flexibility - simulate any planetary weather conditions It`s yours - free to dissect the setup, re-arrange it for your needs. Render and export your sky to any HDRI texture format for use in games or other 3D packages. Heck, you can even render a set of spherical panoramas and sell in a HDRI pack, making more money than you spent on this addon. All future updates included! Works in Blender 2.8x - Cycles and Eevee

@AHVEN - Start laughing as I prefer Blender's UI over C4D in many ways...especially after the R21 debacle when they moved everything around! There are threads on Blender's forums where people dislike C4D's UI so the moral of the story is beauty is in the eye of the beholder. BforArtists is available for those that prefer a different approach to the look and feel of Blender.

This is looking better and better 👌

Honestly, there is not much to impress with the sneak peeks so far. The UV advection and Foam capabilities added to the OpenVDBMesher are welcome additions but (as stated before) Meshtools is not that exciting (yet?) and I see no point to the xpOpenVDBImporter. Talking about xpOpenVDB Importer....isn't OpenVDB an output from XP? What is to be gained by importing? For example, would entire VDB simulations now be able to be handled like any other particle in XP? Nice idea, but I can't imagine a PC/workstation and/or render farm being able to handle VDB data sets to the same quantities as what XP could generate with particles. Thousands and tens of thousands of VDB objects being added to scene would kill most machines. Smaller quantities (around 100 or so) is more likely and probably just as easily handed by MoGraph or Fields. So not sure what the benefit is here. So 2 out of 4 is sneak peeks generating "some" level of interest so far feels like a 0.5 release rather than a full point release. It does make you wonder what else they have been working on. The only thing that would make sense is that all their energy has been directed to GPU acceleration judging by these lack-luster sneak peek videos so far. Now that would be exciting. Dave

More and more users are switching to Blender not because of pricing, but because of what other users are accomplishing with it. In studios it's become quite normal to see Maya and Max users adopt Blender in their workflow. The community is thriving, and this is very attractive to new users as well. The attractive pricing (free) only serves to help adoption, but I think it also has to do with the simple licensing: Blender doesn't even need to be installed to run. Compare with the C4D trial: in a move to make it even more hostile to potential new users, MAXON decided to time-limit the demo/trial and put it behind a registration. Personally, I have way more fun modeling and working in Blender now than I ever had/have in Cinema4d. And I am not alone in this... It's a very robust and quite user friendly 3d app. The tabs I really love: quick switching to sculpting or UV'ing with one click. Tabs were something I also loved in Lightwave. The viewport is an absolute joy to work in. C4D feels very clunky to me compared. Yes, there are rough edges, as there are in any software. C4D is no exception either. The main difference at this point is that Blender is actively being improved making great strides, while C4D seems to move along at a snail's pace. But perhaps with C4D 23 a break-through will finally happen? We can but wait and see. I believe Cinema4d is losing and/or will lose ground because of its abysmal licensing and pricing, unless MAXON changes it. Compare with Max and Maya Indie (even though it can only be used on projects worth less than 100K) for $250 a year, or Houdini, Blender: all have much more attractive pricing schemes. AutoDesk is feeling the heat, and their response to the Blender upheaval in the market is probably too little and too late. Heck, even LightWave seems to attract one or two new users that would have picked Cinema4D instead, but were rebuked by MAXON's licensing/rental plans. Especially in tough economic times like these MAXON's licensing is akin to a kick in the face when you're already down on the ground. And exacerbating the situation is that Cinema4D users, while paying a premium upkeep, need to invest in an external particle plugin, external render engine, and other plugins and apps to keep up with the competition. Something needs to give.