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Being able to manually move the sunlight range and it reaction to keyframes


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The sunlight range as we know, generates at 0,0,0 cords (origin), so if you get too far, your only way out is to:

1) Increase sunlight range. Problem: If you get past like 3000, shadows can start looking glitchy, specially when they are on top of characters bodies when they do smooth and slow movements

2) Follow camera: This option is pretty useless since it would only work if your entire animation has no camera movements, and no one does that. So if you have this enabled, as soon as the camera moves, all the shadows move which is nonsense.

Solutions: Being able to change the origin of the sunrange, instead of 0,0,0, anywhere, so you can keep it at 2000 when shadows looks the best, and you can place it on top of where the action is going on so at least the main elements get nice shadows. This could be represent visually with something like a sun, so you can move it with your mouse instead of manually entering coordinates. Also, those cordinates would follow "background" type keyframe modifications, so you automate where the sunrange origin would be each time you go from one scene to another (for example you are in place A, then the next scene is in place B which is super far in the scenario, so you put a keyframe under the camera of scene A of background type with the given coordinates for the sunrange so it looks nice, then same for camera of scene B.

I hope you get the idea. This is in my book the best workaround given the limitations of Mineimator to cope with casting shadows at long distances.

Edited by moniker
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3 minutes ago, Mimo FanGamer said:

This is actually a good idea, but David is no longer adding new features to Mine-Imator (as far as i know), he will only add new blocks and mods from future updates of Minecraft. It's still possible though.

Well he added the "follow camera" option for the sunlight range recently, so there's hope.

This is a fundamental flaw that could be fixed and improve workflow a lot. Right now, im dealing with it by ridiculous workarounds like moving THE ENTIRE animation (so selecting absolutely everything then moving where the action happens closer to 0,0,0 so the sunlight shadows look good). Needless to say, this is hell, starting from selecting everything which is slow by itself. I sometimes get headaches beause the whole thing moves when there are camera transitions from places that are far from each other. This would save me so much time if it was added.

Edited by moniker
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I have been using "follow camera" lately in some instances with success, but still, we need to be able to change sunlight range values within the background keyframes. In fact, everything within background should be automateable. The more options you have to tweak things with keyframes the more creative you can get.

I can't emphasize enough how useful changing sunlight range values would be for when you need to make an huge zoom out view of a large scenary. For example a city looks great with a big sunlight range from the distance, since you cannot notice the glitches that big sunlight range values create, then when you get back to floor level you put it back to default.

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