4.1 Creating Raindrops

Hello, this is Christopher Kenworthy and welcome to the visual effects compositing course. Our next step is gonna be adding rain drops coming through this space in the ceiling, all the way through the shot. So before the grate falls away and then after it falls away, the rain's going to continue. That just helps to draw the viewer's eye to this space and also makes it feel like a dingy underground place that's leaking through. But before we get to that let's do a little housekeeping. There are some tracks here that we are probably not gonna use to much such as the original corridor shot. So I'm going to just drag that down into the bottom, also the left wall we probably won't use, drag that to the bottom. We could delete these, but you never know if we're going to use them again, so I prefer to keep them around. These track solids as well, we'll pull down here, and other than that, we are just about right. Might be worth doing a little bit of recoloring, because my right wall is the same color as my animation here, so I'll just change the right wall to orange. And our tunnel and trap door are the same color as our corridor clip so I'm going to change the tunnel. And this is something you should really do as you're working, but I've been lazy and now is the time to catch up and make sure everything's easy to see. It really does make a difference later on when you're trying to spot which clip you need and the stacking order becomes quite important from now on. Okay, so we'll go back to the composition and create a new new black solid, we'll name this rain, and to this, we add cc particle world. Now, as always, rendering's gonna take a long time. So, I'm just going to turn off all the layers we don't need. So, I'll leave the trap door, turn the tunnel off, turn off the right wall, I'll leave the corridor. So, now we can play through at a reasonable speed and see that those particles are up there, close to our origin point that we set at the beginning. That's not where we want them, so we'll move that around now. So go up to Producer, and here we want to move the position. So I'll move the x position across like that, until it's lining up with the trap door, and then the z position will bring it closer. So I'll just play through, see if that looks like it's still in the right place. It's not bad. I'll just reposition, make sure that really is in the right spot. Now clearly the particles are going up rather than down, and although we don't need to make all the adjustments yet, I am just gonna change that so it's a little clearer what we're doing. So under physics, I'm going to, instead of pushing the gravity up, I'll drag it to the left to make it a minus number, which makes those particles come down. And I'll change explosive to cone axis. That just makes it really clear where this is coming from. So when I play through, I can see that that does seem to be in just about the right spot. I've attached it fairly close to the edge there, so I probably want to move it a little more to the center. So, we'll position the z and the x. Now, it does appear to be moving. If you look at the beginning, it's up here at that edge and towards the end, it's in the center. So, maybe we do need to affect the y here. So, I'm just going to drag the y down. And now when we play through, that does appear to be in a much more accurate position. So now we can start affecting the particles themselves. We want the particles to be coming out of the whole trap door. So we'll go to the radius x, and widen that to about the width of the trap door and radius z. If you look at this red circle, you can see that that's now about the size of the trap door. I could change the y radius to give a little more depth to that, but I don't think that's necessary at this point. Now, that that's in place, we can start to work on the look of these particles. First thing I want to do is change the longevity because they're actually disappearing at the bottom of the screen here. Some of them are running out. Let's see how long it takes for them to hit the bottom of the screen. It's around the one second mark. So we probably want them to last one and a half seconds. So I change the longevity to 1.5. And you can see that affects their color, because the color is based over time. So, we go down to Particle, and under the Particle settings, we're going to change Particle Type from Line to Motion Polygon. And these, if you look closely, don't look like raindrops at all. They're little triangles and they look very unrealistic. But by the time you've finished with them and blurred them, these look ideal for long raindrops. And change their color, and a Birth Color here. Click the eye dropper, and then select a light color in the window like that. And for death color, select a slightly darker color. Maybe we'll lighten the birth color up a little. There, that looks pretty good. You can affect how many particles you have. This might be too much rain for our needs. So we could turn the birth rate down to 1.5. See how many that gives us. That's probably better. And I'm also going to turn the velocity down to zero. And that just helps with the appearance of the particle's motion as they fall. It wouldn't suddenly start raining as the camera pushes through the shot, so we need to grab hold of the whole clip and move it to the left until the point where the particles are going out of view at the bottom. So just make sure we fit this up to 100%, keep dragging to the left, and there they are hitting the bottom. We now extend this to the right, of course I should change the color of this rain clip. So now when we play through from the beginning, the rain is there all the way through. Now of course we want to blur this, but if we apply a blur filter such as pixel motion blur, it doesn't work with this particular filter. So it's best to explore this rain layer all by itself, so I'll solo it and then render. So I've rendered that out and re-imported it as the raining movie which is here, and then all I need to do in the composition is drag that to the time line. Now I drag it down beneath the animation and ceiling layers here. And then I get rid of the rain that we created up there. Unsollow this and then we need to turn on everything again so we can see how this looks in a situ. I'll change the blending mode to add, and in fact add might be a little too bright so I'm going to change that to screen. And now we can add the pixel motion blur. And I'll probably just turn the opacity down a little. We can work on that later when all the other layers are in and we are certain how it's going to look. But for now we have nice blurry rain that falls all the way through the shot and you can see it's falling from behind the bars up there. And it continues even when the grill is falling away. There's the rain still coming through. So now we can move on, and in the next lesson add some smokey lights to this scene.