After Effects Rain Project

After extensive work in editing on After Effects for my first semester team film ‘Astro Antics’ I already had acquired basic knowledge of the possibilities of the programme. This wet my appetite and I wanted to see what more I could do with it and how much further I could take it. 

I started with creating animated assets that could be used in a film or animation to enhance the visuals. I had the idea of somehow creating a realistic rain effect from the perspective of looking upwards into the sky that you sometimes see in big budget films. I browsed the internet for tutorials to see if this could be possible. I only found very simple overlaid rain effects that were not giving me the dynamics I wanted. I then had the idea of using a third party plugin in for after effects called ‘Trapcode Particular’ by Red Giant. This gives you the tools to design advanced particle effects. Using this I then set about creating a raindrop within after effects to use as a replacement particle to create a rain like effect within a simulated 3d space. 

First I made a 3D sphere out of generic simple particles:

Then by adjusting and playing around with the settings, especially the fractal field settings to create the smooth liquid like form, I managed to create this simple 3D raindrop:

These are the settings I used:

I then used some colour grading and adjustments to give it a more natural looking and transparent raindrop
appearance:

In the next step I wanted to create a scene backdrop in which to test this raindrop effect. When I had a day visit to London I used this opportunity to take a perspective picture of some tall buildings that I thought would suit my scene perfectly. I cropped and edited it in Adobe Photoshop and replaced the sky with something more dramatic:

I imported this image into After Effects and made it into a 3D Layer to allow me to manipulate it within 3D space. I added a new layer I was going to use as lightning flashes and created a mask using the pen tool around parts of the clouds. This allowed me to only use certain areas of the clouds to flash for the lightning effect giving a much more realistic look and feel:

I added a random opacity expression to each mask layer to vary the brightness and timing of the lightning flashes:

I key framed this for appropriate times within the scene:

I then tested various effects to get the flashes layer to blend into the sky naturally. I found these settings to work the best:

After this I applied additional effects such as sun shine rays to come through gaps in the clouds. I achieved this using the same techniques I used with the masks for the lightning layer but just using alternate effects within After Effects.

I also scaled up the photoshoped image at the beginning of the scene and key framed it to get smaller at the end of the scene to simulate the look of a pulling out camera shot or falling down as the scene progresses: 

Start of the scene:

End of the scene:

Now I had my scene backdrop set up I began to add the rain drop I created at the start into a particle effect layer. Using Trapcode Particular I managed to create this effect:

I got this effect after tweaking these settings to give it a rain like downward motion using velocity and physics factors:

Changing the ‘particle type’ to ‘sprite' allowed me to select my own texture model for the particles. I used the raindrop I had created earlier.

Next I simply built up the rain by duplicating the rain drop particle layer and tweaking a few settings to create natural inconsistency and variation.

This gave me this effect:

Finally I added some colour correction and a vignette to an adjustment layer to give it more of a gloomy 
atmosphere and mood:

 The final animation can be viewed here:

I think the creation process of this effect asset was very successful and I learnt a lot more about editing within After Effects and the importance of controlling and perfecting variables until you have just the right setting for what you need. Although I simplified this process down it took me days to figure out exactly how I could create this effect I had in mind and it took a lot of trial and error as well as additional help from online tutorials. I pushed the use of particle effects to the extreme and I believe it paid off. I can now overlay this particle rain asset onto any footage and adjust the settings accordingly. However I spent a large majority of my time working on this and even though most of it was time spell spent I could have probably balanced my time evenly instead of focusing on this individual asset, which essentially is very limited in terms of what it could be used appropriately in. I think if I had the time to do this again I would try and create a lot more variations of the rain from different perspectives and against different backdrops to see if it works in other scenarios. I might have also benefited from studying and researching cinematography and camera angle techniques to generate a more professional looking scene.