With my focus being on 'realtime' 3d work, one of the most important abilities to have is to quickly interact with and iterate on a scene; changing the lighting, time of day, weather conditions and so on. As I've said before, this is one of the main reasons I use CryEngine for my in-engine renders - it offers very good lighting quality without the need for long periods of 'baking' to get the desired results.
The forest at dawn.
To continue my forest project, I've decided to expand upon the size of the environment (still in progress) and create a full 24hr day/night cycle to light it. As usual, this uses most of the rendering features I've talked about before: some environment probes, SVOGI (global illumination), but also introduces a few new things, like volumetric lighting.
The forest in the late morning.
It is important to note, though; there is still some baking in this scene. SVOGI requires a rebuild for major lighting changes, as do the environment probes. However, this only takes a handful of seconds for the entire scene. With further updates to the rendering systems used, this bake time will likely be almost entirely removed in the near future.
The forest in the late afternoon.
Other small changes have also been made to the scene. I decided to increase the rock texture resolution from 1k to 2k, as I found low angle lighting to cause some small artifacts on the rocks due to specular highlighting. I also further tweaked the grass materials to provide a more accurate look in most situations.