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MCprep World Tools

by Patrick W. Crawford

As of MCprep version 3.1.0, a new panel now exists providing quick ways to make your renders look better – and render faster.

How to use the World Tools panel

At this time, there are two main tools in the world panel – but more are planned

Click a section below

View how to use this feature by clicking one of the sections below

Add Dynamic/Static sky

Create MC World

This operator, new as of MCprep v3.2.0, provides options to add both simple and advanced, shader-driven skies to your worlds. There are two primary types of skies you can add:

  • Dynamic World: This is an advanced node shader setup designed for both Cycles and Eevee. It allows for driving the sky colors and brightness based on the time of day, as driven by a time property which will appear in the panel after adding a dynamic world. This allows you to create day, morning, night, and sunrise/sunset scenes with ease, and furthermore even lets you freely animate the time such that you can create your own timelapse sequences. Dynamic skies also import sun lamps, and either shader-based or mesh-based sun/moon. You can even somewhat easily hack the shader to insert HDRs in place of the procedural blended sky colors, and have the shader automatically and smoothly blend between these images. As you change the time, the sun and moon (if enabled) and physical sun lamp follow the time of day in sync. Variants of the Dynamic World include:
    • With Shader sun/moon: This unique feature allows you to have a sun and moon that will appear in the scene but at a distance of infinity, without having to change your camera render distance limit!
    • With mesh sun/moon: The mesh is imported from a source library, and place into the scene around the origin of the scene. Note that, of course, your sun/moon objects exist in the scene like any other object, and so you make want to scale them out to limit the effect of parallax effects relative to the camera, and likewise update your camera’s render distance if you do scale out the distance of the sun/moon meshes from the camera.
    • No sun or moon mesh imported
  • Static World: This is a simpler shader setup and does not offer the ability to animate the time of day, but still is better than the default gray background! Best fit for a midday scene. Options include:
    • With mesh sun/moon: Same description as in the section above.
    • No sun or moon mesh imported

Options also include for adding clouds, which imports a pre-defined cloud mesh and material from a source library, and the option to remove any existing suns from the scene (useful if adding a sun lamp as a part of this sky setup).

Prep World

Prep World

This feature works for both Blender Internal and Cycles/Eevee, and does a number of useful things:

  1. Adds a basic day-sky texture. Works for both cycles and blender internal, and creates a better starting point than the default gray world background. No option yet for setting other times of day.
  2. Optimizes/improves render settings (cycles):
    1. Turns off reflective and refractive caustics (will increase speed over default)
    2. Increases light sampling threshold to a better balance (will increase speed over default)
    3. Sets max bounces to 8 (blender default is 12, and generally this number can typically be lowered further)
    4. Turns on Simplify and sets Simplify AO to level 2 for viewport and render (this will save on average 20-30% on render times with minimal impact; for much faster rendering, you can even set this lower to a level of 1, but be mindful of how shadows and reflections around objects with texture transparencies behave).
  3. Improves render settings (blender internal):
    1. Turns on AO with multiple of 0.1 (may cause renders to be slower, but generally nicer looking)
    2. Turns on environment global illumination (color inherited from sky settings). This may slow down renders, but they will be generally nicer and prevents any “pitch black” scenes.
    3. Turns on ray tracing and shadows (may cause renders to be slower, but generally nicer looking)
    4. If there is a sun in the scene, it will turn on “use sky blend” which will make the rotation of the sun lamp affect the sky color / sun glow position.

 

Additional resources