Interior Lighting Timelapse

I am currently working on my first demo reel and this interior lighting is one of the included projects. It's a timelapse of the light in an appartement changing as the day goes by. 

I got the models and most of the textures from CGTrader. On some particular objects I did the lookdev and of course lighting and compositing. 

Behind the scenes

I started by searching for a suitable interior, so that I could skip the modeling and texturing stage and therefore set my focus on lighting. I found this asset pack by Aurélien Martel on the CGTrader website which I then arranged in a room.

I made a few adjustments on some of the textures to make sure they react to the light how I want them to (for example the curtains, lampshade of the ceiling light, floor, succulente, ...). 

After all the preparation was done, I started with the actual lighting process.

In the beginning I gathered references and watched a lot of videos on how the light will fall into the room through day and night. I animated Vray sun and sky in Maya and also their shadows to imitate sunrise and sunset as good as I could. 

Then I turned over to the artificial lights, basically the night setup. Their animation was done in Nuke and not in Maya because I wanted to be able to change their color and intensity later on if it was necessary. For this I needed to make sure that I render every light in a seperate render layer instead of just assigning them to light select groups because they would not have an individual GI to adjust later (I learned this the hard way). 

On the second render-run I got it right and so I could finally start with compositing. I animated the artificial lights, did some grading and focus adjustments, integrated the volumes I rendered and added some decent dust particles to them.