chunky-dev / chunky

A path tracer to create realistic images of your Minecraft worlds.
https://chunky-dev.github.io/docs
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Improve sun controls #288

Open matthiasvegh opened 10 years ago

matthiasvegh commented 10 years ago

It would be helpful, if the sun altitude slider went to 180° ie.: from dawn till dusk. If the azimuth is say X, when the altitude is greater than 90°, say Y, the altitude would then be considered to be 90°-Y, and the azmith would be X+180° mod 360°.

This way you could play with the sun slider in a slightly more intuitive manner.

llbit commented 9 years ago

I had an idea a while ago that the sun position should be specified by time of day. But the position then depends also on the day of the year, and the location on the planet. So what I was planning to add was a small earth map to select a location, and a date wheel and clock to specify the current time. However, that's a lot of work to implement. I might make a simpler solution such as the one you suggested.

llbit commented 9 years ago

Also, the time-of-day simulation would not be useful when all you want is to control the azimuth of the sun relative to the current position, or when you want to change the altitude without changing the azimuth.

Delvin4519 commented 5 years ago

For most intents and purposes you could use NOAA ESRL'S solar calculator (just have it running in your web browser) and input your desired x, the calculator will spit back altitude and azimuth values you just copy paste into the chunky's render. However you'll need to subtract 90 from the azimuth and then negate the value (just leave chunky's "-" in the azimuth).

I do definitely agree about the idea about controlling azimuth to decide which way one wants sunrise and sunset at, so I can just take the solar calculator's results and decide to offset the compass so I can subtract 105 from the azimuth results instead of 90, and have the meridian be 15* offset from the XZ axis.

I do need the twilight options for the sun between -18 and -0 altitude.