I am trying to make some clouds in Houdini.

The other day I made a few clouds that looked quite nice. Today, all my clouds are coming out with ugly color banding, especially on the dark side of the cloud. See screenshot [i.snag.gy].

I am trying to figure out why the cloud on the right doesn't look the same as the cloud on the left.
- As far as I can tell, the node networks for the two clouds are the same. The only difference would be trivial differences like random seed or light colour.
- The good cloud is in a different project from the bad cloud.
- If I turn up the light intensity on the bad cloud, the problem goes away. It only seems to happen in the part of the cloud that is not receiving very much light.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

There is an option in the Display Options > Effects (press D over the viewport). Toggle the HDR Rendering checkbox and see if it affects your viewport cloud like in my gif capture below.

Aha, that fixed it! Thank you!

I wonder how I ended up changing that setting in the first place…