Animated Iray Rain?
tsroemi
Posts: 3,671
in The Commons
Is there any way or product to make rain run down a window pane in iray? In an actual animation, I mean. I have a feeling that the Texture Animator might be able to do something like this, but can't quite see how. And one can probably just move any of the rain systems available on the y-axis, but I don't think this would look very real. any ideas? Thanks!
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I've done this by animating geoshells with suds on a figure in a shower for example. I'm sure it could be done with rain drops on a window as well. You just animate the offset of the geoshell. I wish I could include examples but NSFW.
Ah, this is a neat idea! Maybe if I layer a few shells / planes with drops moving in different speeds it won't look like just one set of drops sliding down all at the same time. I shall def try that, thanks!
Kinda weird there's nothing even approaching this effect in DAZland I thought while searching, or at least nothing I could find. It's such a nice effect and gives so much life to scenes. maybe people usually just edit in video overlays?
Maybe one of these?
https://www.renderosity.com/marketplace/products/129341/flinks-rain-3
https://www.renderosity.com/marketplace/products/121431/real-rain-effects-daz
I made a new animation (my previous animation that I had linked got deleted from rendo for some reason). But this one is worksafe, just a couple beer glasses with suds animation made with geoshells
https://www.renderosity.com/gallery/items/3261224/beer-suds-animation
And you will need something like the free script MatAnim by mcasual to animate vertical offset properties. There's also paid options, but mcasual's script works fine in DS4.
@donniekeidic, thank you again, that looks right cool! I've been rummaging more around the store as well and found that I have this as well: https://www.daz3d.com/abas-animated-shaders-system. I think this could work, too. It's just a pity there's no update for DS6 yet, which my main rendering machine uses.
It would be really neat in general if we had a sort of general animated effects maker for windows and such, no?
You can always do it by hand. :) That script requires that you have a bunch of images. It's designed for animating a Screen playing a movie or other telecast. For rain. You could just create a tall image and mess with the vertical tiling/offset to make it move down ward. If the image loops top to bottom, you have infinite rain.
There's also this: https://www.daz3d.com/texture-animator QUOTE: Control a texture's position and scale in the timeline. This allows a surface to move horizontally and/or vertically.
Yes, i actually have ABAS and also a different texture animator that I bought years ago, https://www.daz3d.com/animated-textures-script-pro-for-daz-studio-3-4. There's many ways to accomplish similar things. animating the offset of a geoshell is better than just animating a plane imo in this case because its right on the surface of your object, so it auto loops from the bottom to the top or vice versa, stays adhered to your surface, etc.
Animating a series of images with a texture animator is great for things like adding caustics to pool water, or images to a TV screen, but its kind of overkill for water drops I think, you could do it, I've done it but its a lot of extra work as you need separate image and opacity maps for each frame, so you would need 300 image files for 5 seconds at 30fps. With a geoshell you need just 2 image files regardless of how many seconds of animation. Real simple.
And of course there is always post production, many video editors have stuff built in to do these things. I add foreground rain, animated fog, explosions and things in post. Its much faster than using VDBs. Best to experiment with all the tools you can and you will find out what works best for you.
Thanks to both of you!
As to adding falling rain in post, I don't use Adobe, and in Davinci, I couldn't seem to find a function like that at all. There were a few tutorials out there how to create the effect but it didn't look too convincing to me. So @donniekeidic, would you mind telling me what you're using for post-processing?
For adding fog, rain, simple explosions and fire, I'll use some older software that I bought years ago called PowerDirector made by Cyberlink, my version is so old that honestly I couldn't tell you if the newer version is worth buying it as it looks like they've added AI and subscription models. I thought about upgrading but I saw I lot of mixed review on recent versions so I've held off. But it used to be great software for a reasonable one time price.
Now most of my video editiing is actually done in Blender and I just use PowerDirector for those times when I need some effects that are easier done there. But I don't really do lots of after effects to be honest. Water, waves, rain, fire, fog, thats about it. Sometimes I'll render a background in Unity or Flowscape and overlay character animations from Daz in post. I pretty much just piece things together with "digital duct tape", whatever gets the shot I need. But animating things within Daz has gotten a lot easier, so many tools now. I wish I had a better GPU and I would be set but VDBs are pretty much unuseable for me due to memory requirements. I'm lucky to animate 2 G8 figures at once, so I've had to learn to do everything in layers and find lots of workarounds.
I completely missed the part where you said you didn’t think a moving rain object would accomplish the desired effect. My workplace has taken a toll on me recently, and caused me to miss some things. I’m sorry.
@tsroemi
Does it have to be in Iray? Not sure how familiar you are with Blender but you don't need to be an expert to follow a tutorial. The only snag is that both of these methods are procedural so you wouldn't be able to get a seamless looping clip from them without some shenanigans in a video editor.
For Cycles:
For Eevee:
Thanks again everyone for your input! @donniekeidic and @TimberWolf, I think you've given me the final push to give Blender a serious try now. Especially the Eevee tutorial doesn't look too hard to follow, even for a newb, and I really only need the rain effect, so it'll be even easier.
One follow-up question, do you guys also do the editing / compositing in Blender? Like, if I exported an animation from DAZ (let's say, a window sill with a cat on it, then a blank alpha for the window pane) plus another animation for the background (cityscape with some movement) and then wanted to place the rain effect animation between the window and the background one. Can I do that in Blender as well?
@NylonGirl, no need to apologize at all, it's kind of you to take the time, especially with what sounds like a hellish workload on your back.
Edit: I watched about half of the Eevee tutorial and realized that much of the rain effect is just an imported video from someplace else. I'd really rather create something from scratch, and I need to be able to add a separate background, so this method won't work for me I'm afraid.