Actually, in the beginning I didn't like the sunlight object and found it clunky to work with. Now that I got used to it I'm hesitant to say that I like the change back... But I really missed viewport lighting preview from the sun so I guess I can get used to the old sun again.
It may not be hard to live without it when you work on your own but once a client wants to have a look at different sun positions with you it's just more comfortable to have a preview.
The old sun on the other hand had the big advantage that memorizing an alternate sun position was a matter of writing down two numbers and not having to clone the sun object or animating its position. IF there's a way to script a sun helper that will control the new sun object and vice versa, that would be the way to go, rotation and zenith angle are just so easy to work with.
Some hints:
- Previously it was a matter of writing down two values, now it's a matter of setting single keyframe :) If you don't do animation, you can use keyframes as simple storage for sunlight angles. Even if you do animate, you can for example extend your timeline to negative frames, say instead of starting at 0, you start at -10 to get 10 slots to store sun angle. (EDIT: Missed that you mentioned animating, but still, i don't think it's inconvenient)
- If you want latitude longtitude control, you can try following. Just one link, and you can control sun using same values. No visual representation though:
- In general, what is currently happening is what I call a Gmail effect, where people tend to generally dislike new changes as they have to adapt, and every adaptation comes with a bit of frustration, but at the same time, if Google now changed entire Gmail back to 2008 version for example, people would realize how much improvement in a good direction was made since then.
So, if we had this regular targeted sun object, that is consistent with 3ds Max light standards, as well as with direct light objects of pretty much every 3rd party 3ds Max renderer, and keep it this way for past two years, and today, we would change it to the angular sun gizmo, there would be 10 times more outrage than there is now, trust me ;)
