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I'd like to see a night sky option. With moon ideally. I don't know how hard it would be to do stars and satellites linked to the date and position

Hello chedda,

Yes, it is an interesting topic.

We use to think about this quite often, but keep in mind that Maxwell is basically a light simulator (more than an environments simulator), and from the lighting point of view, the position of stars, constellations and satellites in the night sky is irrelevant (very little lumens come from them).
It would be hard to code a night sky simulator (where the position of planets and stars would be a correct estimation) regarding the little amount of light you finally get from them. Their contribution to the lighting on a scene would be almost equal on every stars disposition.

In fact, you can easier get it with a nigh sky HDRI map.

The only relevant light source would be the Moon, and now since Maxwell v3, you can easily simulate the Moon with the "custom Sun color" feature, that you can easily set to white on a constant black background.

A more sophisticated Moon with estimation of phases depending on calendar would be better and easier with an HDRI environment.

Cheers

Dario Lanza

Hi Dario,

i totally agree to what you mentioned concerning the amount of light coming from stars etc.. but what would help is a more fine grain control over the atmospheric effects that happen during "blue hour"
as i the real world within minutes the entire sky can change and it is a typical setting for architectural imaging that i usually simulate with hdr, but it would be so nice to have some rays of sunlight still..
also knocking on sun+hdr illumination channels limitation to be removed

regards,

daniel

it will be good feature
Dario what about adding moon texture for sun ? with real settings month ; day ....etc
it will better if we can get other settings for moon because sometimes we can see moon and sun in the sky