Can you animate a HDRI/Sky Dome?

RexRed

Can you animate a HDRI/Sky Dome?  Can you rotate it slowly? 

I just wondering if there are any tips?

Can you animate a distant light?

I am thinking, in this aspect this is where Bryce still rivals Daz, even after many years.

Perhaps VDBs and a distant light in conjunction with HDRIs can emulate a cloudscape/sun/sky that is moving.

How do you evolve a VDB?

 

Gordig

Possibly, using mCasual's script or ABAS, but I'm not sure either of those works on environment settings. You can do it in other programs, for whatever that's worth to you. 

WendyLuvsCatz

you can a distant light, I have had no success with HDRI animation in D|S, use it often in Octane (not D|S plugin)

murgatroyd314

It might work better to leave the HDRI stationary, and rotate the entire scene.

RexRed

Thanks WendyLuvsCatz for the info on the distant light, I have not gotten around to testing that out but knowing the distant light is animatable is a big help!

And Murgatroyd, what a brilliant idea to rotate the objects in the scene!

Unless you are doing time lapse effects the sky only needs to move a tiny bit.

When the camera moves it gives the sky the appearance of moving or rather you can't tell if it is not moving.

Moving the camera too much makes it seem unnatural.

Can you put all your scene elements into a group and animate the group? Sorry, I have not tested that either.

The environment can be placed into a group I believe but probably still not animatable. 

RexRed

It has occurred to me that placing a HDRI on a sphere and animating the sphere is a partial solution to this. Give the sphere image emissive properties, the clouds kind of move but they do not "swirl and undulate".

VDB clouds are sort of the same, they can be moved XYZ, be rotated and resized and small patches can be moved independently of one another. Given the massive size of the sky, this can work.

The sun can be placed on a clear sky HDRI and placed within a sphere, as a backdrop and move independently of the clouds. Several HDRI layer images with the sun in the same place in the sky with variations of color and brightness can be animated with opacity. Or one could just use an emissive sphere as the sun. Using a sphere as the sun then the HDRI on the sphere would not be needed if the clouds were to be VDBs. Coloring the background of the sky is an issue and isolating the sunlight from the sphere. And what about the northern lights effect?

The idea is not to use any plane-based clouds in the simulation but only VDBs. What about multiple VDBs in a scene? How does that work?

VDB haze and fogs can be incorporated as well. 

This is like recreating Bryce within Daz.

But nothing really compares to being able to animate turbulence within a VDB.

Using several layers of VDBs (can VDBs overlap?) and animating cutout opacity (can you animate opacity?)

I have a script (I forget its name, oh yeah, ABAS (thanks Gordig)) that allows shader animation. Can I use this to animate the texture/color of a VDB?

Once a sky system is made it can be saved and recalled for a scene.    

 Or even just saving the project is a form of recall.

It seems my next project is going to be animating a sky.

Gordig, what is this "mCasual's script"?

Is this product VDBs?

Volumetric Clouds for Iray

https://www.daz3d.com/volumetric-clouds-for-iray

...and what about creating a real looking starfield?

I need to further analyze the difference between volumetric clouds i.e., geometric shape clouds versus VDB clouds i.e., particle field clouds. 

...and whether these cloud systems work together.

The trick is getting the transparency and reflective shine right so they don't look like a floating object/plane in the sky. (How objects respond to light)