Time-of-day sun + weather — for idiots
The problem. Before this, the 3D world was frozen at noon. One flat, boring light, all day, forever. Real places don't look like that — the magic is dawn, golden sunsets, and night.
The fix. A little machine called DayCycle. You tell it three things:
- where you are (latitude — Sweden is 59.5),
- what day it is (0–365; midsummer is ~172),
- what time it is (0–24; 12 is noon).
…and it tells you exactly where the sun is and what colour everything should be.
What you see when you slide the clock:
- Morning: sun comes up in the east, light is dim + a bit warm.
- Noon: sun is high, light is bright + white.
- Golden hour (just before sunset): sun is low in the west, turns orange/red, shadows get long. This is the pretty one.
- Night: sun drops below the ground, everything goes dark.
Why the sunset is orange (the cool part): we don't paint it orange. The same air that makes the daytime sky blue also strips the blue out of the low evening sun — so it goes red by itself, using real physics we already had (atmos). Free realism.
Weather knob: flip overcast and the sky turns flat grey, the sun hides, and everything gets soft + even — a proper cloudy day.
Where to play with it: open the demo, find the Photoreal day-cycle panel, drag the hour slider, tick overcast. Watch the little sun/sky colour squares change.
That's it. Time of day now works.