Moonlight?

[craigmonroe1]

If mental ray and v-ray have a sun, why not a moonlight? Is there an obvious reason why they don't and im missing it or...?

[Stephen Thomas]

Unlike sunlight, I can't think of a reason you would need to have an accurately placed moon by time of day, location etc. Moonlight would generally be used for artistic effect and there are much better ways of simulating it using existing tools (Vray sphere light, spotlight).

[salvador]

Or a good moolight HDRI.

I agree with Stephen Thomas; a moon system would be unnecessary.

[craigmonroe1]

Just curious. I don't think it's a huge deal.

[RyderSK]

It's definitely not crazy idea, some renderers integrated such complex Sky systems, from head Indigo renderer comes to my mind, but I think few more have such system as well. It's not that easy to create but yes, not huge deal.

 

Both Vray and Mental have really basic sky systems (Preetham, CIE,etc..), neither complex enough to simulate all times and weathers. They don't even sample them directly so they can be obsolete in many ways. People who wanted complexity recreate sky system using color gradients + directlight/sphere lights and those who want easy workflow and nice result out of the box, go for HDRi. So there isn't really motivations for them to implement another feature on this front.