Making rain FX
 

I saw a video, linked to from this forum (somewhere on DVi), placed here by a regular.

The video showed a little boy running across a field in a dark a rain storm. The last part of the video showed the actual video, before effects were added. no clouds in the background, no rain, and a sunny day.

I can't find the video to ask the person that did the work. IMO the work was very good.

I was wanting to know a good way to reproduce this, the rain, that is. I have some ideas but wanted to know how this specific example was accomplished as it was very good. The rest (lightening and clouds in the background) I can do.

as jack black would say, "me baby, me"

http://rileyharmon.com/wordpress/?page_id=54

Riley,

As I've already said, great work. The clouds, the lightening (lighting up the area) the rain, the lightening in the background and darkening the scene, all well done.

Would you mind telling me how you achieved the rain effect?

Thanks,

particular in after effects, or you can get some stock footage on the net of it, just google rain in after effects and you're bound to find something

a 3d particle system would create the most realistic effect -- the rain would have depth and can be set up to disappear or impact against invisible planes and objects. also, you have the capability to the closely match the lighting in your 3d rain to the lighting in your footage.

Henry
 

Is this a brand of product (3rd Particle System)?

I use Vegas. If this is a plug-in, do you know if it is Vegas compatible?

Thanks,

I think Riley used Trapcode Particular. It's a particle plug-in for After Effects.
It's like $200-300.

I don't know of anything like that for Vegas. I'm in the same boat as you, except I already have After Effects, just don't feel like paying 200-300 just to fake rain.

hi jesse...

sorry if my post was a little unclear. a 3d particle system is usually one component of most upper-end 3d packages like 3ds max or maya, and they're a large part of the special effects business. its these particle engines that can make planets explode into a billion fragments, generate a swarm of bees and move them along a motion path, and make a volcano ooze molten lava. they're extremely powerful and flexible, and the particles can be anything from a simple sphere to instanced geometry, like a bee, to metaballs, which morph together when they collide, to create fluid simulations. these particle engines, with emitters, deflectors and forces, can also make very realistic rain.

that said, trapcode's particular, and some of the built-in particle tools in after effects, can generate some very nice effects very quickly -- you saw riley's clip, and i used the trapcode plugin for a couple of tv spots i just worked on. they can do some similar things to the high end 3d packages, but when comparing the possibilities, they're understandably quite limited.

There are built in 2D particle features in AE that can help, and since a rain drop is essentially a 2D object to most cameras, you can make use of AE's ability to disperse 2D elements in 3D space to create some amazing rain simultions.

That said ... my personal favorite approach is to go real for this visual effect.

At night, set up a light outside to shine through water falling from spraying a garden hose into the air and use manual adjustments on your video camera get a clear image of the falling white drops against a black background.

THIS you can composite in any comp tool, AE, Combustion, Shake .... even most NLEs like FCP, Premiere and of course Vegas.
Use a levels or curves filter to stamp out any noise in the black of the video (make it true black) and use an "ADD" overlay/blend mode to layer the rain over your video (which I assume has already been altered for lighting and storm clouds.)

The biggest feature films make extensive use of practical effects like this.
No reason you can't too. :)
Have fun.

I love this forum...

Thanks guys. As usual, I keep getting educated.

You both mentioned particle engines. It seems that one set runs in After Effects and the other runs in graphics applications like Maya.

Are there any crossover particle engines, i.e. that they work in both Maya and After Effects?

Does anyone know of any particle engines that will run in Vegas?

Henry, your weren't unclear, I was uneducated.

particleIllusion 3.0
Whist it will not work in any of the mentioned applications as it is a stand alone program it is quite good. But you will pay for it.

The SE version has a 30 day trial version and is $99, to buy particleIllusion 3.0 is $399 it also has a trail version which puts a watermark on the video.

I have the SE version and am upgrading to particleIllusion 3.0 soon.

http://www.wondertouch.com/index.asp

Bill

tutorial?
 

Hey Riley, would you be up to doing a mini (or maxi) tutorial on that whole rain shot for people new to this area? How to achieve "night", adding lightning and rain?

If Riley has the time for this, that would be great. We might even get to make a sticky of it, because that shot has a lot of effects in it (clouds, rain, lightening, night, colors,...) so it would be handy...

Rain in Motion
 

Keep in mind that Motion (if you are running a Mac) has a built-in rain effect which can be quite effective if used properly, and you don't have to worry about learning a new 3D app.

Vegas, under the "Noise Texture," under "Media Generators," can be used to generate "turbulence" which can be manipulated into clouds, smoke, rain, etc.

The rain produced in Riley Harmon's video : http://rileyharmon.com/wordpress/?page_id=54
seemed especially realistic and vivid.

I looked at Particle Illusion SE and will probably download 3.0 to try to see if it can produce similar results.

Ernesto mentioned Trapcode Particular, I have a fairly old version of After Effects and may see if the plug-in will work with my version.

Does anyone know of any other stand alone or Vegas plug-ins that can be used?