How to animate a sun position clock?

Question

What is my goal: I want to make an animation of different products in the same studio environment, which shows the product during the course of the day. For that I am using the sun position in the world properties. In the top right corner I want a digital klok which uses the time from the sun position settings. For every product I want to use a new scene (product1, product2, etc), that way I can setup command line rendering and let my pc render every night.

How far did I got to reach my goal: First problem I got was the time in the top right corner. First I used animation nodes (as advised in this question Show time of day in render), but results were not consistent in command line rendering. Then I decided to use Leomoon plugin. This plugin has a problem with a little bug in Blender so it won't follow the animation when you parent the text to the camera. Because of that bug I have set-up another scene called "overlay". In the "overlay" scene I set the Leomoon plugin to dynamic and give it the expression bpy.data.scenes["Product1"].sun_pos_properties.time. The testing of the above scene product1 goes perfect. Problems come when I want to go the second product scene. At that moment the first product scene is not used, so the time does not change anymore.

Solutions I tried:

• Make a sun position set up in the overlay scene. It doesn't work, time doesn't change, I expect this is because it is not the "active scene"
• I searched a lot to change above expression to the active scene, but I can't find anything useful on that.

Solutions I don't want to use:

• Create a new .blend file for every product and only use two scene's. This solution will use a lot of HD capacity because every blend will save all the studio data again.
• Create a new overlay scene for every product. I will go with this one if there is no other solution, but that will be so many scenes and a lot of work to make all expressions and compositing use the correct scenes.

Is my goal possible and what would be the best way to reach it?

Answer 1

bpy.context.scene is the active scene. So you can use that with whatever Python solution that works for you as bpy.context.scene.sun_pos_properties.time.

You could also use app handler that gets the active scene anyway:

import bpy

def sun_position_time_handler(scene):
    time = scene.sun_pos_properties.time
    hour = int(time)
    minute = round(60*(time % 1)-0.5)
    text = str(hour).zfill(2) + ":" + str(minute).zfill(2)
    for o in scene.camera.children:
        if o.type=='FONT':
            o.data.body = text
bpy.app.handlers.frame_change_pre.append(sun_position_time_handler)

This will change all text objects parented to the active camera to display time of the active scene on every frame change. You could use another app handler type.

In order to make it work from the command line you have to enable Text->Register for it in the Text editor. You have to have Auto Run Python Scripts enabled in the preferences:

Or you can save the script to a separate file like handler.py and run it from the command line:

blender -b C:\Test\test.blend -P C:\Test\handler.py -a

Answer 2

I'm not experienced with using Scenes, but if just having an object on the top right corner in a camera view is enough, I think you can do it with the Geometry Nodes setup below.

The setup has two main parts:

1. First we capture the Time information from the Sun Position panel and convert it into a string so we can create a text object via the String to Curves node. To capture the Time information, you can simply right click on its value box and choose Copy as New Driver. Now we go to the Value node at the very beginning of the setup, right click on its box and choose Paste Driver. It'll turn purple, indicating that it's being controlled by a driver, and it'll automatically update whenever Time changes.

Then, some maintenance: the Time value uses a generic float value, which means when time is $12:30$, for ex, it shows it as $12.5$. We isolate the hour part by using Math—Truncate. We isolate the minutes part by using Math—Fraction, then map the 100-number float value to a 60-number hour value by Math—Multiply'ing it by $60$. We finally join these two parts together by a Join Strings at the end, using "$:$" as the delimiter. There's also a Switch setup in between to make sure it always shows double digits by adding a $0$ at the start if the value has only one string.

2. Next part is making sure the generated clock text always faces the camera and stays fixed on the "screen" (camera view). Always-face-the-camera part is done by passing the camera's location and rotation information on to the text object's, via a Transform Geometry node. We use another one of those to move and scale the text relative to the screen—in reverse order for technical reasons.

Since the text is not an overlay but a real object, it can be obscured by other geometry when camera gets close to them. To fix that, you can enable the In Front option in Object Properties > Viewport Display: