Apple Motion: Realistic Rain Tutorial (Revised)

hi this is simon obstal in this tutorial for motion five we're going to be looking at creating this sort of rain effect and you can see this there's a fair bit to it so we've got this reflection we've got these ripples proper futuristic type splashes and uh yeah so it's some interesting techniques here that uh i hope you'll find useful so we're not actually going to be creating this scene but we're going to be creating a rainy street in downtown tokyo and it's going to look something like this so let's begin by checking on our project settings 1920 1080 24 frames a second and 10 seconds long so i'm going to begin by importing my background image now i'm using this very nice shot of a techie side street from alexander passaric uh via pixels.com go and check out his lovely work there i'm not going to put a link to this in the comments but you can go and find either this image or you could use an imagery your own now the reason i've chosen something like this is because this effect works best if you've got lots of nice kind of lighting contrast so we've got this dark sky and these very bright signs and lots of fun colors and so on so that it's just going to make the whole thing look much more interesting if we've got that kind of lighting effect so i'm going to scale this up to 210 and then i'm going to move it back 1000 pixels on z then what i'm going to do is i'm going to make a new group and i'm going to import the texture called 4k floor now this i'm going to put links to all of these elements apart from the alexander image into the comments so there's my floor i'm going to set its scale to 50 and then what i want to do is open up the rotation have a rotation x rotation of negative 90 then a y position of negative 100 and a z position of positive that's my flaw and next i'm going to take my background image and duplicate that group so right click duplicate and i'm going to move that to the top above my floor i'm going to take the image and i'm going to rotate it through 180 degrees because this is going to be our reflection now we need something to mask it so that it appears just in the area of the floor and to do that we're going to make yet another group command shift n or you can go to object new group so i'm going to import the thing called puddle mat looks like this so the first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to move the anchor point of this i'm coming down to the bottom here select the anchor point tool turn on the overlays just want to move the anchor point to the top of the frame like that so that's actually going to be 2 000 pixels so that's off the frame like that then what i'm going to do is i'm going to adjust its y position negative 100 because i'm trying to line it up with my floor so negative 100 on y positive 1 000 on z and we need to rotate it through negative 90 on x and then we can use that to mask our reflection so i'm going to take this group that's got the reflection in it i'm going to add an image mask i'm going to take the group that's got the paddle mat in it add it to the source well and switch to luminance and now you'll see we've got the reflection in that kind of puddle area there so i've just taken a little bit of time out to label my groups here background for that background image floor for the floor image and reflection for this foreground group with the reflection in it and matte obviously for the puddle mat itself so then what i want to do is let's add some rain i'm going to make another new group command shift n and i'm going to import the element called rain render looks like this now this is an h.264 and it's therefore got no transparency so i'm going to select a screen for the blend mode and now we've got rain falling like this we might feel that rain is a bit too heavy looking so i'm going to come to color levels and you'll notice that if i just adjust that black value i can make the thin the rain out a bit like that just so it's a little bit less crude i can brighten it up of course by adjusting the white value as well so i'm going to leave it somewhere around there so i've called that group rain gonna close it up and now let's look at creating these all important splashes in the water because obviously without splashes we just know that this rain is not actually interacting with our scene so we're going to make yet another new group so command shift n and i'm going to import the element called simple splash bring that in so simple splash looks like this it's just two concentric circles and a dot in the middle and it's not very scientific but it will do the job for this i'm not going to explain how to do it in this tutorial but i might do a follow-up in which i explain how i've created some of these secondary elements for this project okay so what we're going to do is we're going to take that simple splash and we're going to make particles in other words create an emitter now obviously there's no transparency here and i need to hit the additive blend button there i'm also going to while i'm at it turn off random frames because we want them all to be proceeding like so i'm going to reduce the speed down to zero because we don't want these to move pedals don't sort of slide around they just stay in place and let's increase the birth rate to 500 then what i'm going to do is change the shape to rectangle the arrangement to random fill let's adjust the size so i'm going to have 2000 by 4000 and then i'm going to come to properties and rotate it through 90 degrees on x and as before i'm going to bring it down 100 pixels on y and forward 1000 pixels on z so again it's lining up with my floor hopefully so let's make a few adjustments to this uh come back to the emitter i want to set it to 3d then i want to come back to my simple splash element and reduce the scale down to 20. and rotate it through negative 90 on x so now we've got a whole field of puddles splashes whatever we want to call ripple rippling rippling splashes and what we'll need to do is we'll need to add to this group add object generators color solid turn it black and move it to the back of the group so now we've got something that looks like this and we will come to the group important to turn on fixed resolution like so and we can turn this off so i've labeled that group ripple displace because we're going to be using it to displace the reflection so in order to do that we are going to come down to our reflection group now what i'm going to do is i'm going to make a new group inside this and so command shift n and i'm going to put my background or my reflection layer into that and to this group here i'm going to apply filters distortion bump map and i'm going to grab that ripple displace group and add it to the bump map source well like that and now i think you can see we've got these splashing puddles if i turn that on and off nothing and splashes ripples i need to get my terminology right so i'm going to call these ripples and that's looking pretty good i might just increase then let's increase the number of ripples i think so come back to the emitter let's maybe go for 750 instead yes let's let's exaggerate it so that's quite good so if we come back to the bump map we can increase the intensity of that so if we wanted to really exaggerate it we could go for one i think probably somewhere around 0.4 maybe even 0.3 is enough we just don't want to over exaggerate this i think that looks fairly natural so i'm going to add an extra form of displacement at the moment all we've got is these puddles that are just lying flat on the surface but when the drops hit what they'll actually do is they'll send up little droplets which then fall back down to the surface so to create those droplets i'm going to make a duplicate of this ripple displace group so duplicate that and i've called that splash displace so i'm going to open up that group and i'm going to add into it a new element and this one is going to be called drop splash small like this now drop splash small is very very small so i'm going to have to zoom in to show you what it looks like again i'm not going to show you in this tutorial how i've made it i might do that in a follow-up so a little bit of particles a little bit of edge collision as the droplets hit the floor kind of thing zoom back out again so we're going to use this as the particle source for the emitter instead of the simple splash so i'm going to drag that over the particle source there particle cell i should say like so i can delete that simple splash copy let's isolate this group and see what it looks like so we've got these splash elements so it's a little bit big and what i'm going to do is i'm going to come to that drop splash small and i'm going to reduce that scale i think down to around 50. well precisely 50. and then i'm going to set this group temporarily to add so we can see how it's working in relation to our other display so i'm going to turn that ripple displace on and you can see that there's they're not quite matching up and that's because of the slight mismatch in scale between the two elements so what i'm going to do is i'm going to just adjust that y position to negative 86 and now i think you can see they're all emitting from the center of those circular ripples and we're back in sync as it were so let's turn off that let's turn this one off as well we don't need to see that and we're going to add another bump map so i'm going to make another group for this it doesn't work if we add bump map filters to the same group so we need to add each one to a separate group so i'm going to make a new group and i'm going to drag these into it and i'm going to apply distortion bump map to this new enclosing group and i'm going to use splash displace as the source and i'm going to turn the amount up to 1. and we'll need to sort of zoom in to see exactly how this is working but you can see here for example if i just step through you can see we've got this really quite realistic looking splash effect because we've got these droplets that are reflecting the environment exactly as exactly as they would do in real life but we're not we're not coloring the background we're actually displacing it and using the kind of ambient light of the scene to create shiny droplets that's not too bad i've exaggerated those droplets you'd probably make them a little bit smaller i think but i've exaggerated for the purposes of this tutorial just bear in mind that if you adjust the scale you'll need to compensate by adjusting the position of that emitter just so they line up in the way that i showed you earlier on but i'm not done yet with the displacement effect i'm going to make yet another new group and what i want to do here is you'll probably notice that the the surface apart from where the splashes are happening is completely mirror-like it's got no displacement no movement in it at all and that's not very realistic the water's been disturbed so therefore it would get some ripples you know there's probably some wind or whatever that would would be causing the surface of the water not to be completely smooth so let's look at that as i say i've made a new group here i'm going to add object generators noise and then i'm going to rotate it through negative 90. again i want to position this where the floor is so negative 100 on y position positive 100 on z position and i'm going to scale it to 165 so it's more or less covering the floor area like that now by default the noise generator doesn't have any animation so i'm going to add some using stylize crystallize let's set the size down to the minimum which is 0.3 and let's have a speed i think of 0.2 we want just a gentle rippling effect that looks like this so we will also need to add the black solid to this so i'm going to just grab it from one of these other groups there we are hold down the auto option key drag it into this new group move the color solid to the back so i've renamed that group waves of displace and now let's look at look at applying it to our reflection puddle so we want to make another new group and i think what we want to do is probably have the waves as the base layer so i'll come down to my original image and then make a new group just above that put it into there and we'll apply this to this bottom group so filters distortion bump map and grab that waves displace add it to the bump map source like that it's not displacing and that's because i made a mistake and i didn't turn on fixed resolution so you'll see as i do that that's now working and we can adjust this bumper let's turn off the other two while we have a look at this you can see we've got this nice naturalistic rippling effect that's got correct perspective in relation to the scene you know we can we can increase it but i mean that actually looks quite realistic if if we're assuming there's lots of rain but it's going to disguise our nice puddle action too much so i'm just going to keep it low somewhere like 0.1 is enough i think just for the purposes of this turn on my ripple splashes over the top of that and then turn on the vertical splashes as well now our scene is looking a little bit odd because uh when obviously not looking at the floor in the the street level in our background image so what i'm going to do is i'm going to create the impression that we're on an elevated walkway and to do that i'm going to add in some sort of bridge structure at the back here and i'm going to also add it into the front so to do that i'm going to come to that floor group let's close up that reflection for the time being to make ourselves a bit of space come to the floor group and i'm going to import the element called girder and it looks like that and i'm going to come to object replicate let's set the shape to line i have a start point of negative 2 000 end point of positive 2 000 and let's have six points and then come to its scale and let's reduce that down to 50 percent and then we can just move it up like so so it's just sitting just there on the back of our scene let's maybe go for 120 looks probably about right now a couple of things are wrong about this one of which is that we can't see it in our reflection so i'm going to just again adjust the anchor point of this element so that it's sitting on the bottom there like that and then i'm going to take that and i'm going to duplicate it so right click duplicate and i'm going to add it into that reflection group right at the bottom there along with my main image so just drag that into there and then what we need to do is we need to rotate it through 180 on x so now you can see we've actually got the bridge structure reflected in the puddle and it's being displaced along with everything else in a photorealistic fashion so that's good i also want to create the effect of a shadow of this structure running across the walkway so i'm going to take the replicator in the floor group there and duplicate it and i'm going to come to properties and i'm going to rotate it through positive 90 on x and then i'm going to scale it up on y quite a bit like so all the way to the bottom of our frame like that i'm going to come to filters color levels let's grab that white out value and reduce it down quite a bit like that and then we just need to blur it so filters blur gaussian blur let's have an amount of 150 and we might also want to just change the blend mode of this to multiply i think so it's more convincing perhaps just reduce the opacity just a little bit that'll do i think and one final thing i want to do with this is to bring it out uh as a foreground element so we can have we can track past it in the foreground so i'm going to grab the version that is not blurred so that's the original master version and i'm going to drag it out just above the reflection group there to make a new group with it inside and let's just move it towards us somewhere around there it's going to be about right so i've called that foreground bridge element but i'm just going to turn it off because i just want to address the puddle which i've only just roughly uh laid out so far so let's come to the matte select the puddle matte element i'm going to position it at 300 on z and then scale it up on y i think i'm going to go for something like 45 maybe a little bit more something like that just so we're getting a larger puddle area where we got actually 50 is probably going to do it so we can do something interesting with this matte that will actually add to the realism of the scene so what i'm going to do is i'm going to add a color levels and i want you to look what happens if i adjust the black and white out values so if i adjust the black you can see that actually i've got some subtle reflection so that's none i've got some subtle reflection outside the puddle area as though that area is wet but it's not a deep puddle like the like the main puddle and at the same time i can adjust the white out to make my puddle a little bit more see-through don't want to do too much of that but it kind of helps i think so if i take turn that off it's just adding a little bit to the to the realism i think now the other thing to notice is that we're not getting any splashes outside the puddle area and that's not looking very convincing because surely we should be seeing some of the interaction of the rain on the areas that are wet but not deep in water and i think we can fix that by coming to our splash displace element there and turning it on and switching that blend mode to something like color dodge and we've got too much at the back there i'm going to fix that in a second but you can see now that we've got this whole set of rather cool splashes outside the puddle area but just creating the impression that the rain is also falling there if i turn that on and off that's not looking quite right but that is now there's one thing that's gone wrong here and i want to fix it while we're at it and that's if you'll notice that because the nature of motion emitters for the first second or so there's no action happening and we can fix that by selecting the emitters so we need this quite carefully because we need to have them in sync so both of those that have command clicked those and dragging them back on the mini timeline dragging them back by let's drag them back a good 40 frames or so maybe even more and then coming to the end of the timeline and hitting o to make sure they run for the full duration and now we've got proper emission action happening right at the beginning and what i also want to do is just adjust these z positions so that we're not having particles coming up above that floor line or appearing to so the fix is to come into the emitter and set the height to 2000 pixels and set the zed position to 1500 and i need to do the same for both of those so they stay in sync so 1500 on zed and an emitter height of 2000 and now that's looking rather better so you'll notice that we've really slowed to a pitiful crawl at this point and this is well because we're running so many simultaneous particles and displacement and so on but the big problem is what would happen if we added a camera so i'm going to add a camera and i'm going to switch to 3d and all of a sudden all of my displacement disappears and that's because these groups can't be 3d so you'll notice if i set the ripple displace back to 2d that reappears same thing with the splash same thing with the waves we're back to normal they'll work as 2d groups but they won't work as 3d groups however we obviously want to have a camera in here because we just don't want a static scene so how are we going to get around that well the fact of the matter is that we're going to have to render out these displacement elements and bring them back in and use the rendered versions to act as the bump map sources so first of all i'm going to just quickly set up a camera move and i'll be back in a second so here's my camera move i've had to turn off the bumps while i set it up because with everything running it's uh really starting to create difficulties for me so anyway there you go so i'm tracking across and pulling out a little bit on on zed but that should give us a nice feel i think once we've got the lighting and so on so let's just have a look at how we are going to create these rendered elements so what we want to do is we want to solo these groups so i'm going to solo the ripple displays first by alt clicking on its view button like so but we also need to switch it to 3d so we get the benefit of the camera move so you see that we've now got those ripples moving as they're being affected by the camera and we can render that out and that will be a usable displacement for our scene because we can keep it as 2d so what we're going to do is going to come to the share menu export movie and because this is just a basic black and white element and we don't need anything fancy i'm going to keep it as h.264 just for convenience and then let's call this ripple ripple render and we're going to render that out let's make a new folder for this let's call it displace elements and take a few seconds just to render that out won't take very long because it's not a very long sequence not a very complicated element but it's obviously going to save a lot of time and resources if we do it this way so that's my ripple element done um solo that by alt clicking it again and let's solo the splash element and again let's make sure to switch it to 3d so we get the camera move and then come to share export movie we'll call it splash render save that one out as well unsolo that and solo the waves again make sure to switch into 3d so we get the camera move again share export movie call this waves render and save it out so we can unsolo that again so we don't need to see any of these but we do want to keep that nice splash element that's giving us our overlay of the splashes so we can see splashes on the the semi-wet area okay and now we can make a new group at the top here and we want this group to be 2d obviously as uh as we've been saying and what we're going to do is we're going to import these three displace elements like so so let's call that group displace elements and now we can just assign these individual elements to their appropriate displaced elements so i'm going to select the waves there and then use the waves render as the source turn that on you can see those waves are happening now i'm going to select the this is the ripple turn that on and add the ripple render to the source so now we've got the circular ripples and finally let's select the bump map for the splash turn that on and add the splash render to it and now we've got everything happening we've got decent performance because we've uh we've rendered those elements out and everything is moving together with the camera as it should and let's just come down and turn back on our foreground bridge element so we're seeing that as well so there we are actually i need that foreground bridge element to be right at the top don't i not quite right at the top but what i actually want right at the top is the rain so move the rain right to the top and the bridge element just underneath it and what i need to do with that rain is make sure it's not 3d like so so it sits in front of everything and now what we can do is we can add a light and it's already starting to look better but what we need to do of course is we need to isolate the reflection and the background so they're not hit by the light so let's select the reflection group and come to properties lighting and turn that off and let's do the same thing with our background turn off the lighting and what we can do i think to make this much more interesting looking is to add a nice glow and i'm going to use the best glow you can get which is hawaiki super superglue add it to the background there that's a little bit too strong let's increase the threshold to 0.75 and maybe reduce the amount down to about 0.5 but you can see how that's already starting to look much nicer because it's got that sort of hazy glow that you'd get with this sort of humid rain and we can copy that onto the reflection element inside the reflection group so all to drag that onto there so we've got the copy of it and that's looking pretty cool i think so what we can also do is we can add some extra lights to make this a little bit more fun so i'm going to duplicate that light and what i'm going to do is i'm going to grab that color of that sign there and just maybe increase the intensity a bit quite a lot in fact like so so it feels like we're getting a little bit of that ambient light uh and we could do if we come over to this other side uh we could maybe pick the color of this let's move that light over to that side so we're getting that color over there let's duplicate it one more time let's move it over to the left hand side and let's pick this color here again that's looking a lot nicer because we've got those colors that are derived from the scene just making everything sort of sit together a little bit not more convincingly one small thing i've noticed is that uh because of some various operations the uh the shadow element has dropped down too low so i'm going to set that to negative 99 so it's just sitting just above the actual floor don't know how it got to 105 a bit all of a bit of a puzzle but you can see that now that's actually acting as a proper shadow and it just makes it more convincing so that's about it um i think we will leave it for there as i say i might do a follow-up with uh some some tips on how to create some of these elements the the displace elements and so on so let's leave it there for there for now thanks very much for watching see you again soon [Music] you

Channel: Simon Ubsdell

Views: 3,525

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Id: 9VfV1w0uACE

Length: 34min 55sec (2095 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 14 2021