Flying over solid cloud cover, is this possible?

[fascinator]

I have a scene I need to create to reveal a city where the camera starts out from the city and moves over the top of clouds until the city skyline starts to poke through the clouds.

1. I've tried using the fog volume and feathering it, but making it really large just crashes.
2. I've tried using the Octane Scatter and scattering a fog volume or an external vdb but that doesn't seem to work.
3. I've tried using the cloner object on the fog volume and external vdb but it develops the same problem as just making the fog volume really large, C4D becomes unstable.

Any tips would be greatly appreciated or if some other program would be better for this type of FX approach, I'm all ears.

Thanks!