A Theory: Day/Night Cycle in Blender

[cskid13]

I have an idea about how to do a day/night cycle in blender. It consists of four skydomes, each the same size. They should be centered at (0, 0, 0.75), (0, 0, 0.25), (0, 0, -0.25), and (0, 0, -0.75). The top two of the domes should be textured with the night texture, and the bottom two should be textured with the day texture. Then the top two domes should slide down and the bottom two should slide up very slowly, until the night domes are on the bottom.

Each dome should be 41.666...% visible, so that the two on the bottom have a large effect on the time of day, and the third from the bottom has a smaller effect. Note that this is just a theory. I have not learned about transparent objects in Blender yet, but I hope to learn tonight.

So, would someone be willing to test this and give me feed back? Or, I can learn and do it myself.

[dendwaler]

I think its easyer to texture one dome with two texture layers.
one day and one night texture.
Make an ipo curve to animate the second texture.
In the first frame the col slider of the " map to" section, the color slider has to be set to " zero" .
Set the same col slider in last frame of the intended animation cycle to " 1."
In that way the night will blend slowly over the day texture until day is fade away for 100%.
This trick is what i did for the journey clothes in turtle isle.
And what i did in the not yet released next version of Turtle isle which has a day and night cycle.
It works easy and seamless.Of coarse you can add more layers and animate them in the same way in order to fade away clouds in the evening
to get a clear blue sky then blend it to the night and finally let fade in stars slowly.
Actually you are only managing the transparency of the non transparent parts of a texture layer.
To let it become day again, just mirror the ipo curve.