Mental Ray Daylighting

As my final animation requires a scene where a bullet is followed over an ocean, I decided to work with lighting effects on my previously made ocean scene. To test out reflections and to just create a bit more of a scene, I quickly put together a basic boat.

With the boat, water and camera already in place from before, I set up a daylight system by going to create > lights > daylighting. By going to the modifiy panel of the newly created light, sunlight should be set to mr (mental ray) sun and skylight set to mr sky. Set position to manual also. The light should be in the centre of the  water plane and shining down from above.

The colour and intensity of the sky can be adjusted with the Blue/Red tint and saturation options.

To create a duskier scene, the Red/Blue tint and saturation is increased. This makes the sun glow more orange.

The scene can be made foggy by increasing the mr Haze option to about 2.0 and setting the visibility distance to about 100 to make it distant over the ocean. In mr Sky, the suns intensity can be increased by turning up the multiplier.

After adjusting various parameters and camera angles, this is the final effect I will use in my animation.

I was going to look at using Reactor to create the water so the boat realistically bobbed up and down, but due to deadlines closing in I thought I should get on with what already needs to be done instead of extra effects. Here is a rendered video of the scene.