- [Voiceover] We just saw how to enter in static values
which will then cause the clouds to animate.
Now we're actually going to keyframe
the parameters or properties of the
atmosphere editor itself.
If you've got anything in the preview down here,
clear it out,
right-click on the preview options and discard.
Also, expand the current animation
time range out to it's original.
So click here to set the animation start to zero.
And now we're back to our full eight seconds of animation.
Open up the atmosphere editor,
and let's go to the light tab.
Here we've got our light intensity and light balance.
Light intensity of course is the strength of light.
Light balance allows us to control the relative strength
of the ambient or skylight versus the direct sunlight.
We set these values in order to get a pretty gloomy,
dark lighting set up.
We can animate these values to simulate the effect
of the sun coming out from behind a cloud.
First let's disable forbid atmosphere animation.
If that is on, then turn it off.
And in this state we're actually in an auto-keyframe state
for the atmosphere editor.
Let's go down on our timeline to about three seconds
and fifteen frames or so
and change one of these values.
I'll set the lighting intensity to zero.
Click in that field and type in a zero
and we get the warning dialog.
We're modifying the atmosphere at a non-zero time.
Do we want it to become animated?
This time, yes.
I want to give you a warning before we go any farther.
If you turn forbid on again after creating
keyframes in this window,
then you will lose everything that you have done.
So you can only disable forbid and start creating keyframes
after you've set all of the static values.
Your workflow should be to set all of the static values
such as for example, the direction velocity,
and the position of the sun and so on.
And then the animated values you need
to set at the very end of your workflow
because there's no turning back.
Once you've entered in some keys here,
you can't go back to static editing
or you'll lose all the keys.
Alright I'm positioned at three seconds and fifteen frames,
the light intensity is set to zero or none,
and the light balance I'll set up a bit to eighteen percent.
So the sun's gonna come out from behind that cloud.
Click okay to exit the atmosphere editor.
Let's examine what we've got.
Open up the properties and also open up the splines
and scroll in the properties
down to the bottom to atmosphere and select that track.
And we've got a keyframe at frame zero
and a keyframe at three seconds and fifteen frames
just as if we had used auto-key here.
Disabling forbid atmosphere animation is equivalent to
enabling automatic keyframing in the atmosphere editor.
I want the transition to be a little bit faster,
so I'll click on this left most keyframe
and drag it over to about one second and fifteen frames.
And we can click over here and take a look at that curve.
Once we click in that graph it's going to refresh,
showing now that we have two keyframes.
Let's do a standard ease in, ease out,
drag a rectangle around those,
right-click and choose ease in, ease out.
And now we've got our lighting transition starting at
one second fifteen frames, ending at
three seconds fifteen frames.
Close up these panels here,
close the spline,
close the properties,
and now we're ready to build a preview.
Let's re-enable everything so that we can
see a full quality preview.
Enable rendering for the island,
procedural terrain, the sea,
the clouds are already visible,
we'll also make the trees visible.
And double check in on our preview settings, right-click.
We're going to render final quality at
five frames per second
with a size of four times.
Click okay and then click to render the preview.
Our animation preview has completed,
and once again for performance reasons,
I'm going to hide this main camera view.
Stop the playback,
and then just go over to a different view.
We'll make it the top view,
zoom out a bit and rewind.
And focus in on our playback here.
The highlighted frame is the current frame.
We can see it become brighter as we open up
the atmosphere settings, changing from a very gloomy
to slightly less gloomy afternoon.