Time & weather, world environment setups

[TheDuckCow]

This provides a workflow for quickly setting up macroscopic lighting and render settings for a scene. This acts more like a preset with some configurable settings, based on a workflow and setup specific to TheDuckCow's workflow. It is not intended to be changed or modified to fit any given workflow or setup, but rather provide newer animators an easy way to setup their worlds without knowing all the details. It should serve as at least a decent starting place for most animations and renders.

• Create a panel/UI for the tools, with a simple weather setting and time setting to initialize setup
• Make the time of day setting animatable (this may be too much of a stretch and have only limited uses)
• Make the base level settings, with speed/option popups
• Setup the world to react to a time of day setting
• Provide basic options to create weather (such as via particle systems)
• Option to create a sun, and setting it up in an effective manner to fit scene (vertex parent to camera? make it just far out and large and auto-increase clipping value of all cameras?)
• Ability to one-click add clouds
• Support for all for both cycles (with or without filmic blender) and blender internal

[TheDuckCow]

Made some recent updates to have very basic prep world settings for both Blender internal and cycles, and while having a framework in place for setting time and such, have not implemented the actual sun and moon and time changing component.

[TheDuckCow]

Marking several more of these items done with the 3.2.0 release! Main features left to implement: weather settings and particles. Some ideas:

• Rain: Place in a plane above the cursor location with particle system setup and timeline/emission density fitting to the current timeline selection. Reuse local group for rain particles if it exists, else create it.
• Snow: Similar to rain, but with different settings and perhaps a more varied physics option.
• Lightning: One-click add lightning object, which would be set to appear only on that frame. Mesh with some warping (modifier?) and optionally auto animate it appear and disappearing, with settings for number of hold/fade frames (if fade frames, then would need one unique material per instance of lightning). Consider how this page shows lightning strikes with some jitter.
• Mist/fog: Setups up an efficient and faster rendering volume shader for Eevee and Cycles, weighted to ease lighter at the very top of the generated mist cube.

[TheDuckCow]

Updating for additional plans, also include a general-purpose particle spawner:

Imagine selecting a Minecraft material (material selector/generator to be created) and then pressing a button to generate a particle system from the 3D cursor, for things like creating dust or block particles as a result of impact or a footstep. Could also be used for splashes, creating instances of snowballs to be thrown, arrows to be shot, fireworks etc. This would largely be a macro proxy for setting up the particle systems (or animated instances, if applicable for e.g. arrows etc) rather than a fully managed system.

[TheDuckCow]

Closing for now, and moving the weather feature to a new issue #96