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I'm trying to create an animation of sunrise, I searched for some videos and I noticed the sky has multiple color, For example it starts with purple from black, goes to Yellow then turns into light blue(day sky color)-

I tried gradient material on a dome with no luck.

How can I simulate this in blender cycles? Can I use volumetrics and multiple light colors? Fog? Or what? My scene is in the sea so I need all around lighting which will have different colors. I did some research but unfortunately I didn't find anyone who made something similar.

Thank you for your answers. Cheers.

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  • $\begingroup$ Check if this is worth making an answer: imgur.com/favndWc. Sorry for the quality, I've rendered it with 1 sample. $\endgroup$ – cgslav Oct 9 '17 at 13:44
  • $\begingroup$ Yes please. I would love to know how did you do it. $\endgroup$ – Sam Mousa Oct 10 '17 at 13:21
  • $\begingroup$ Could you please tell me how advanced you are in Blender? It's kind a broad topic to make an answer here covering every step. I can make some overview of methods I've used and you could read about them here or learn from tutorials. Main tools/techniques are animating node values in Cycles, animation along Curve and some basics from mesh creation, materials and compositing. It could be enough things to cover nice video tutorial ;) $\endgroup$ – cgslav Oct 10 '17 at 17:37
  • $\begingroup$ Hi Luke.I'm quite comfortable with the above topics. And I did play with the nodes to create a transition from day to dusk(sky texture) and night fall with environment texture (using transparent shader to control transition) a video would be great. But do as you please. I'm fine with both. $\endgroup$ – Sam Mousa Oct 11 '17 at 17:58
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If you are talking about Cycles, try using the Sky Texture parameter node in the World settings tab. With it you can create a semi-realistic sky with a sun. The sky and sun reacts in color to the position it is in. You control the position with the shadowed sphere gimbal.

enter image description here

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If you need more control, I would probably start trying to connect nodes with color ramps and curves.

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  • $\begingroup$ I know this.and it poorly simulate light scattering. And at night when the sun goes down the sky is still lit. I used brightness contrast node for that to dim it even further. Thank you for the answer though. $\endgroup$ – Sam Mousa Oct 10 '17 at 13:22
  • $\begingroup$ Unfortunately thats all you are going to get on automatic without putting either some money into plugins or doing some elaborate node-work. Rayleigh-Mie scattering isnt an easy topic for 3D graphics. $\endgroup$ – AdamTM Oct 16 '17 at 14:11
  • $\begingroup$ @cegaton sure.I got a very cool effect with starry night and with fade and everything.I'll post it when I get to my pc. It involved using sky texture and a night time hdr and mixing between the two using a gradient texture as a factor for the mixing. Anyway I'll post it tonight. Cheers. $\endgroup$ – Sam Mousa Oct 20 '17 at 10:11
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i manged to get a satisfying result. some work is still needed. you might want to make the transition more gradual using the color Ramp

node setup enter image description here

dope sheet enter image description here

plugin used to connect sky texture with sun(very helpful, you just animate the sun rotation to change time of day) enter image description here

actual animation process enter image description here

results in transition areas enter image description here enter image description here sorry for the low quality gif and water mark but its straight forward. use the color ramp to control the transition..

i used y rotation =90 on the vector of the gradient to put the hemispheres on top and bottom original enter image description here x=90 enter image description here

you can animate x rotation in mapping node of the night sky to fake the rotation of the earth(stars will move like reality) of course you have to animate sun lamp color and strength too for realistic lighting. I hope this will help.

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