Maya Lighting Animation

Sunrise to Sunset Animation

My intention with this exercise was to create the illusion of a transition from night to daylight and back. I did this by manipulating keying my directional light to animate exactly how the sun would.

Light and Shader Setup:

Using Lerp statements, I modified the Directional Light’s intensity and color based on the number of frames in the animation. I added a Spot Light for fill and altered its prenumbra and dropoff in order to give it a softer feel. Finally, I added my custom animated shader once again for the gear objects, a matte shader for the ground plane, as well as three separate plastic shaders for the spheres and tori.

Slim Setup: