Idea - day/night shifts in time for environment

[qoosh]

I would like to have a way to make the time pass in the scene, and shift from day to night automatically. It is like from Zelda Ocarina of Time, the sun will come up and down every 20 minutes or so, with different environment ambience for day and night, shadows moving to the sun's position, and a moon and sun changing positions and revolving around the ground. And you could control when this happens with sliders/ plugins.

 

[HolySchmidt]

Nice idea! I think you could easily create this with the Timeline plugin in some way.

You just need a center object (kind of) in the middle of the scene, a circle around it as an orbit and an invisible light as a spotlight circulating around the center via timeline, always center orientated. You know what I mean? Light intensity would be from 0-100-0 (kind of) in 12/12 as a day/night cycle. As a moon you could add another light on the same circle 180° away with different light colour. Something like that.

 

[RandomVAMUser]

I agree, lighting part (position, intensity, color, etc...) is feasible enough.
However, if you wanna go into more details and have skybox/spacebox (daysky/nightsky+sun/moon position)
it might be a bit difficult (especially with fade in/ fade out, rotation).

you can use built-in skybox intensity to add fade in/out effect,
but there's only Y rotation, that's kinda mehh, it needs X or Z rotation (unless you are flat earther).
-you can try fixing rotation by using CUA skybox instead, but you can't use fade effect (kinda double edge).
you might be able to colorize CUA from white to black to get fade effect (idk how and if that's gonna work on skybox)
-also using skybox with visible sun looks weird, especially when sun & clouds are rotating at same speed

There's also built-in "SpaceBox" atom that you can use for night sky + X/Z rotation works
-but same issue as above, you can't adjust "alpha" or any type of transition for fade effect (between day/night sky),
-you can toggle it on/off or hide material but that looks unnatural.
Especially after skybox fades out (it suddenly pops) and than insta gone before daylight transitions back in

Overall great idea, but for full effect it might require some trickery (something else to help with transition).
Hmm..maybe use inside of ISSphere as your little dome/skybox, maybe load some texture (like sun with no clouds or sun & moon on oposite sides)?
That way you can rotate it, colorize it, adjust alpha, however you like...even transition alpha off so it reveal spacebox behind it (during night time)....just an idea

 

[qoosh]

Thanks for your input. It's something that I'd like to see someone who is more tech savvy than me create a scene demo for and maybe a plugin too.

 

[HolySchmidt]

I never said this would be easy for me, I said it would be easy for you