Changing the Time of Day

With the Time of Day editor, you can change the sun’s position in the sky and set day or night.

1. Open the Time of Day editor by choosing Tools, Other, Time Of Day.

2. At the bottom of the editor window is a section called Timeline.
   

   Drag the handle to see the sun change positions and lighting.

   The default setting is 12:00 noon. In the following image the time is set to 6:00 a.m. In the image below that, the time is set to 3:00 p.m. Notice the differences in lighting.
   
   

3. For this tutorial, you set the time to 4:30 p.m. To do this, under Time, for Current Time, specify 4:30 PM.

   This gives you a rosy sunset glow for your scene.
   
   

4. Because you changed the time of day, you should re-render your environment probe map in keeping with best practices.

   To do this, in the Entity Outliner, select the EnvironmentProbe entity.
   

5. In the Entity Inspector on the Environment Probe component, under Cubemap Generation, next to Cubemap, click Generate.
   

This ensures that your cubemap is rendered at the right time of day to get the best visual quality. Small hour to hour increments are not very noticeable in terms of visual differences that occur with cube maps. However, if you compare a 12:00 p.m. (noon) map with a 12:00 a.m. (midnight) map, you notice a significant change in the lighting.

Next: Creating a Light Source