Animated Rain and Splash Effects | Blender 2.8 Tutorial

hey guys it's Steve here and after doing some experimenting in blender I found some really cool methods for creating some realistic rain effects not only creating and stimulating a raindrop falling but also rain hitting a surface splashing leaving ripples and eating wetness on that surface so it's a really cool method and it actually shared my finished results from this a few weeks ago on Twitter and a lot of you guys thought it looked photorealistic and we're convinced that maybe it was a video clip so I'm really excited to share my secrets with you guys today and I hope you guys find this video very easy and helpful you wonder what else is super easy and helpful this video sponsor - land with - line you can securely store and manage all of your passwords from one place keeping them safe and making it super quick and easy to log in anywhere from any platform or device it will also autofill password and credit card information with just one click being a creator myself I have many 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Suzanne monkey head but today we're going to be using it on a flat road so I'm going to enable the images as planes and on any preferences as well as the node regular add-on in the Preferences to go ahead and able both of those and then download the road texture you want from CG bookcase there'll be a link in the description I used a nice wet one that has some cracks in it so once you've downloaded your textures go ahead and hit shift a and add that image we're just gonna add in the base color material and then all you have to do is rotate it 90 degrees Longley Y rotate 90 degrees along these Zed and then scale it up by 5 by hitting S & 5 now I'm gonna switch to my look dev here so you can see what that texture is looking like and it's looking pretty good let's go ahead and add the rest of those PBR materials to finish off this material so opening up the shader editor here I'm just gonna disconnect the color from being connected to the Alpha and add in another texture for the roughness this is just going to be set to non color Dada I'm connected to the roughness on our PBR shader do it again for the normal map again changing it to non color data and adding in a normal map node connect it to the normal map node and connect this up to your PBR material and already you can see it's looking pretty amazing now I'm just going to duplicate one of those image textures one more time this time opening up the AO texture and connecting that with a multiply node to our base color plugging it in the bottom you can see that this just adds some depth and darkness to those cracks now we need a raindrop so I'm just gonna go ahead and go shift 8 and add in an eco sphere then going into edit mode and grabbing that top vertex I'm going to pull it up using proportional editing so hit o to a name of proportional editing and then choose a sharp fall-off here you can see I can just pull it up now and make it sort of look like a drop scaling it down to a nice little skinny raindrop and then right-clicking and choosing smooth shading on that object now we need a very simple material for this raindrop so I'm just going to delete the default principle shader and add an a glass shader this I'm going to change to an IRF value of 1.33 no roughness and then just connect that to your materials output and that's gonna be it for the material on our raindrop now we need something to emit our arraign so I'm just going to duplicate our Road texture here pulling it up along these that access and we're going to use this to add in our particle system so jumping over to the particle systems tab and adding a new particle system I'm gonna go down to render and choose render as an object and for that object we're gonna use that ICO sphere that we just created as our raindrop you can see here if I play it back now we already have rain falling from the sky whoo-hoo by default under the velocity settings has set to 1 change this to 0 or even negative 1 to kind of shoot the rain downwards instead of shooting it up a little bit letting go ahead and make the lifetime last 250 frames or as long as you want your animation to last I'm just going to move this plane up a little bit high so the raindrops are actually falling a little bit faster basically the higher the plane the faster the rain is going to fall as gravity starts to take effect and then I'm just gonna change the lifetime of these particles to something like 36 or 37 so the particles are already hitting the road but once they're passed to the road they can die and not be needed anymore give it a little bit of random scale to make those particles look a little bit different and now let's crank that up to about a hundred thousand particles for a downpour so now you can see we have a complete crazy downpour but is it enough no we could have even more rain make it two hundred thousand woohoo so now that we raining cats and dogs go ahead and bake that simulation in the cash tab just save your project and then click bake and then you don't have to touch the rain at all for the rest of the video and now that we have our downpour baked it's time to start adding some of those effects to our road so I'm going to the physics tab and enabling dynamic paint on our road and adding in a new canvas now I'm gonna grab our particles and go to physics again an enable dynamic paint but this time this is going to be a brush and a brush and then under the source choose the particle system and the particle settings that we just created under the effect size of these particles we want to be very small so make it like a point zero two and then for the smooth radius we don't want any smooth radius so make it zero so then selecting the Cannabis we're gonna change our format from vertex to image sequence we can give this a resolution of about 1024 give it a few sub steps to make that animation a little bit smoother and then scrolling down all we have to do is give it a little bit of initial color we want it to be black before it gets painted by our range so go ahead and make this color black under initial color and then uncheck dry and we're gonna enable shrink for this we want to choose a speed of something pretty small like 8.6 this will allow our particles to hit make a spot and then shrink very quickly after a few frames so now all we have to do is make an output folder for this image sequence so make a new folder call it something like splash and choose that as the output choose that UV map under the output settings now jumping back to our particles we're gonna change the paint color from blue to white so we have this affecting our canvas with a bit of white paint this is gonna be used in the material editor to give us some really cool effects so with all that setup we can go ahead and bake the image sequence so as that image sequence is baking you can see in that folder that you created on your hard drive you have all of the images being saved out and if I jump to this here you can see that we have those are particles appearing as they hit the canvas in a white paint and then shrinking after a few frames to nothing this is exactly what we need so now we're gonna make another image sequence and this is going to be for the wet map so go ahead and make a new folder call this one something like wet and choose that one as the output folder then we're gonna uncheck paint maps and choose wet maps we in a disabled shrink and enable spread for the spread we're gonna change this to a speed of something pretty small like a point zero six so we want to spread very slowly and then we're gonna go ahead and able dry and for this one to choose a time of about 140 or 150 this is how many frames it takes for that paint to disappear into nothing so this is gonna be used like I said for the wet map so you can go ahead and bake this image sequence now and again as this saves out you can see what these are looking like and again it's similar to the other particles except instead of disappearing they're slowly expanding and dissolving and this is gonna be how we affect the wetness on our road now we need one more image sequence saved out so for this we need to create a new surface so create a new surface and disable that first surface go ahead and name it something like displace and for the format we're going to choose image sequence again resolution 1024 again give it a few subframes again and then we're going to change it from a surface type from paint over to waves for this we're going to choose open borders and just change a few of these settings so for the time scale I'm gonna make it a little bit slower by going at point eight and then for the speed I'm gonna make it much slower by going down to about eight point three the only other thing we have to change then is the smoothness I like to take this down to about a point three as well okay so now going down we're going to change the file format from PNG to openexr as this will give us a little bit more data for our displacement maps create a new folder name is something like waves and choose that as the output and you're ready to bake your displacement Maps so go ahead and choose bake and as you can see these are saving out as well for the waves you don't really get anything to look at as the image sequence as this is more data that's not really visible to the eye but you can see the file sizes there so it does contain that data that we want so now we're all done baking it's time to add these image sequences to our road material so creating a new tab here again and switching to these shader editor we're gonna start off by going shift a and adding a new image sequence and for this image sequence we can open up that first sequence the splash hit a and click import image sequence go ahead and choose cycle and auto refresh and everything else is already ready to go so now we're just gonna add in a mix shader' change it to add and connect your image sequence to the bottom socket over the color output you can see that this allows us to have those wet points added to our color material and they change as the water droplets hit super cool you can even use the color ramp here to kind of adjust how much white is visible now we can add wetness to our material by adding in another image sequence this time choosing the wet image sequence again hitting a and importing all of those images dropping this down by our roughness texture we're going to first need to invert this texture so it's black instead of white so go ahead and add in an invert node and then another color mix change it to multiply and connect the inverted color to the bottom socket of that multiply node you can now see if we control shift click on the roughness map we have those spots showing up on that roughness texture and this is going to add the wetness effect now to our material so you can see there we have some wet showing up where those raindrops are hitting now I'm gonna duplicate that multiply node up to our base color and I'm gonna take the inverted image sequence again and connect it to the bottom socket this will just add a bit of darker color everywhere that water hits the road so now it's time to add that last image sequence the displace so go ahead and shift a image sequence and choose the waves go ahead and hit a and import all of these now we're gonna add in a new vector bump node drop this in after the normal map node and connect this to the height input this will allow it to displace the road using that wave texture and right off the mat you can see we have those wave ripples added to our road and it looks really cool you might want to take the strength down just a little bit but at this point you can now go ahead and play back your animation in the viewports and see it working in real time using Eevee you can see we have those little splashes that wetness those ripples and it looks really cool for distance shots this might be all you need to do to get a very cool-looking finished rain effect but we're gonna take it to a whole nother level by adding actual splashes everywhere those raindrops hit the road so do that I'm gonna go ahead and add in a default cube and we're gonna simulate a little splash so with that default Cuban we're just gonna jump over to wireframe mode and at the top of the default cube I'm gonna add in an eco sphere well skills down real small to be our water droplet and make sure it's inside of that default cube then I'm just gonna grab that cube duplicate it and scale it down a very little bit and then scale it down along the z-axis placing this at the bottom of our cube this is going to be the fluid inside of our domain object so grabbing that base cube I'm gonna go over to the physics settings and choose fluid and then choose a type of domain then I'm gonna grab that cube that we added at the bottom choose fluid for this type is going to be fluid and then for that echo sphere again fluid and choose fluid for it now we want the fluid to be falling to the ground very quickly so along the Zen axis in the velocity give it about a negative 10 and this will cause it to fall very fast so now we just have a few domain settings to change first of all the final resolution I went with is a hundred and then you can change the speed to something like 0.5 so you have even more frames here to choose from for rendering now I'm just going to add two subdivisions under the boundary and then give it a point to under the particle generation to give it some particles in that splash with that set up though all you have to do is go start bacon and you're gonna have your stimulation ready to render and after a few minutes you can stop it because we already have that splash and that's all we need to render out so I'm just going to choose smooth shading on that we're gonna set up our camera to be along the side of that splash so just setting your viewport there and go in control 0 will snap it to your viewport now you can go ahead and position that camera right along with the splash at the very bottom we don't want any of the water visible just the water splash so I'm gonna grab the two objects that I don't want rendered the IKOS fear go to the object info under visibility uncheck show and renders same with that fluid along the bottom uncheck shown renders now for a main fluid object we're gonna give it that same basic material of a glass shader with an Iowa value of one point three three and no roughness this is gonna give us a material that looks like water and then for the render engine I'm switching over to cycles now from evie because we're getting serious and I'm changing the device to GPU compute and making sure that it's using that Titan r-tx and the Preferences under system for rendering now I'm switching over to render view and you can see we have some water being rendered but it's not looking very cool because nothing's being reflected in it just yeah so jumping over to our environment settings choose a new environment texture and for that environment texture I'm using the Shanghai HDR from HDR Haven which is pretty much the coolest HDR ever you can split your window open up a shader editor now and switch it from object over to world here we can change the rotation of that environment texture by selecting it and hitting ctrl T with the node R angular an add-on enabled it'll add it in for us and I'll just go ahead and change the rotation along these that access to something like 40 then jump over to the render settings and under film choose transparent as this will give us a nice transparent background for rendering and you're ready to render so hit f12 let that render once the render finishes go ahead and save it out as a PNG naming it something like splash 1 and you can actually repeat this process choosing a different frame in your simulation rendering it out again and again saving that image as another PNG for some variation now it's time to import those images right back into our file scene by using that import images as planes add-on and going shift a and adding the image and then choosing that splash that we just saved out here you can see we have the splash image back in our file scene and I'm just going to tap into edit mode and pull that image up so the orange origin point is at the very bottom of our splash there that's important to keep in mind and once that's done we can go ahead and change the scale it's a little bit scaling it up along these edge so our splash kind of splashes up a little bit more I thought that just looked kind of cool now we just have a few quick material tweaks changing the IOR on our principal shader to 1.33 and then taking the roughness down to about a point 1 we're also gonna quick add in a mix shader' here at the end of our node tree adding in a transparent shader in the bottom socket and then setting it to something small like you point to just to give a little bit of transparency to that splash I also added in a hue/saturation value to the color texture here and then cranked the value up a bit higher just to give it a little bit more intensity now you can just go ahead and duplicate that splash image jump to your materials tab and click that two to make it a separate material and then go ahead and open up that second image that you saved out as some variation you can also change the scale of this to make it look a little bit different than your first splash and we're ready to hand those splashes to our surface so grabbing the road we're gonna go over to our particle settings and create a new particle system for this one the choose hair and advance and you can see we have all those hair strands rendering there so I'm going to jump back to our look dev and then also delete any lamps that might be in your scene as we only want the HDR light lighting this scene but we don't want this road being hairy we want it to be splashy so I'm gonna go over and grab both of our splashes there and go ctrl G and make a collection out of this name of something like raindrops now grab that road and we're gonna change the render ass to collection and then the instance collection will be those raindrops and you can see we have splashes all over our Road so this is pretty cool but it's not landing in the right places yet and they're also kind of big so make them smaller and give them a little bit of random scale as well now here's where the real magic happens you just scroll down any particle settings to textures and click new texture then jumping over to the texture settings along the right bar there you're gonna see we have a new texture added here for that texture we're gonna open up our image sequence splash that one with all the little white tasks of disappearing import that image sequence and you can see that we have that image sequence opened up there choose cycle and auto refresh just like we did in the material editor and you can see that those particles are now changing when we change the viewport image then scrolling down under the mapping you're gonna want to change the coordinates to UV and then choose our UV map right there and then the final step which is the coolest part is down under influence you're gonna uncheck general time and you're gonna check density now this is going to allow those particles to appear everywhere there's a white dot so you can see we only have one showing up right now that's because we don't have many particles on that particle system so scrolling up let's give this just as many particles as we gave it raindrops something like 200,000 and now you can see we have raindrops splashes happening all over our road surface anywhere we have one of those white dots there's going to be one of those splashes appearing at some point so that's pretty cool and if I switch to rendered view for cycles here you can see we have a little bit of an issue with some alpha mapping so jumping over to our render settings you can go ahead and uncheck transparent now and then under the light paths you want to change the transparency passes to be something like 64 and you can see that those splashes all rendering nicely now now the one bummer right now is that currently this doesn't update on its own if you were to play it back in the viewport you have to go to the texture settings here and force it to update by clicking the refresh button for every frame it does do this when you render maybe about but kind of a bummer that we can't play back in the viewport anyways moving on you can see that all these particles are currently aligned flat we want to fix that so jumping to our particle settings here check rotation and then under the orientation access choose normal give it a different phase number and then give it some a random phase and this will just kind of spin them around and give them all sorts of different rotation which when you render it here will actually give them some sort of a 3d effect to those 2d planes which looks really cool okay so setting up a render now uncheck show emitter for your rain particles and go ahead and add in another camera this camera we're gonna position right inside of our raindrop somewhere cool like give it a focal length of maybe eighty so you have some more depth of field and speaking about depth of field go ahead and enable depth of field let's give it a distance of something small like e 1.8 and then let's give us some bouquet effects by giving it five blades under the aperture and you can see if I jump over to a cycles render here we have the bouquet effect rendering in the background and again it's really cool looking you can see that our render is a little bit blown out so jumping over to our environment settings change the strength that HDR to be something like 0.25 and that looks much more moody and kind of cool maybe take the scale down on those range Rob it's a little bit as a little bit oversized right now in my opinion and under your color management settings in the render setting so you can choose a high contrast look to give it again sort of some cool color grading enable motion blur under the render settings as well change to something like a point five or point six and hit render well that's about we have a really cool looking render but there's a little bit of noise and we can fix that by jumping over to the compositing tab choose use notes and just add in the filter D noise this is the new Intel denoiser and blend a 2.81 and it does a really good job of cleaning up all that little bit of noise that we were getting into the scene and it looks pretty cool this is rendered at a thousand samples but you can render it at as many samples as you want and I rented out a few frames here so you guys can see what it looks like animated as I jumped through these three frames you get those splash effects shown up all over the place and it was ripples on the road so I hope you guys enjoyed this rain tutorial more like a rain tutorial splash effects as I said you can put this rain on any sort of surface so be really cool to see what it looks like on a car or something so if guys create something cool sure in the comments below if you enjoyed the video hit like again like to thank dashlane for sponsoring this video and I'll see you guys all in a future video tutorial

Channel: CG Geek

Views: 973,826

Keywords: Blender, Rain, Effect, Tutorial, VFX, Blender 2.8, New, Dynamic Paint, Simulation, Water, Splash, Free, Easy, Realistic, fluid, CGI

Id: 35bbyAJodEQ

Length: 20min 12sec (1212 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 01 2019