BLENDER | ROTATE HDRI (WITH DISTANT LIGHT)
Just gonna give a quick run down here of how to rotate an HDRI/world light - along with a distant light so the shadows stay lined up. In Maya I would just parent the two lights(dome and distant) to a curve control or even just put them in a group and rotate the group, but since the world light in Blender is separate from the rest of the light objects it’s a bit more complicated. There’s a few ways to rotate an HDRI/world by itself that work fine(item tab in the ‘n’ menu and use the rotation values or a mapping node with a texture coordinate node); will post a link to tutorials on how to do that here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqd4mc42sZQ
However parenting the world to an empty object is from what I’ve found the best way to be able to rotate the world along with a distant/sun light. There’s a tutorial I found on YouTube that shows how to do this, at least how to parent the world to an empty, but when I tried this for some reason everything went yellow and the HDRI disappeared in the viewport render mode(or just looked super stretched).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOsEzn04gAM&t=58s
To resolve this I ditched the empty technique and parented it to a UV Sphere instead and scaled it up(you can parent it to any object really, a cube may have been better to be honest because it may be less distracting). Then I set the render stats accordingly so it wouldn’t show in renders or be distracting in the viewport. Also made sure to name it properly in the outliner and turned on it’s “name” display in the object properties tab(orange box) so it’s clear what it is in the viewport. Then to parent the sun/distant light to the same control so they rotate together, I just selected the distant light and then went to the object properties tab(orange box) and under the “Relations” drop down I parented it to the same “worldLighting_cntrl”. Now when I rotated the sphere everything rotates together. And if you need to tweak the individual rotation of the sun/distant light you can still do that if you need to re-align it at all by selecting it and rotating it. Will post some screenshots with my setup.
Originally posted: November 1, 2021
Just with HDRI/world
Just sun/distant light
Both the HDRI/world and the sun/distant light(maintains the soft/darker contact shadow near object and harder more realistic outer edge of shadow(if it were a clear sunny day) with accurate indirect fill light)
Illustrating the problem you get if you don’t have some sort of control to rotate both lights together(double/crossed shadows)
