Realistic Rain Drop FX Tutorial! 100% After Effects!

hey what's up Andrew Kramer here videocopilot dotnet and welcome back to another very exciting tutorial today we're going to be taking a look at creating some realistic rain effects inside of After Effects without any third-party plugins so let's go and take a look at what we're going to creating [Music] all right so some really cool details here and you can see that the light from the background is actually affecting the refraction of the water we can also see a nice variety of raindrops including some long drizzle pouring down the screen now I just realize there's a bunch of songs about rain and I even did a google search and there's hundreds of songs have you ever seen the rain Purple Rain the list goes on and on so I thought it might be cool to play one of these songs to sort of set the mood but unfortunately YouTube has an automated system that will flag a video and you can get your channel taken down so unfortunately I won't be able to play a song but what we can do is play all of the songs simultaneously you hear that when all of the songs are played simultaneously it creates the sound of wood now if I open up the title comp you can actually see that this is a fully interactive project so what I can do is I can come over here change the color and it updates the refraction and the entire effect so this makes it really easy to customize and use it for whatever you need and if we move it around you can see that it interactively changes the refraction and just has a really nice look now some of you may remember a similar tutorial that we did a long time ago that let's just say doesn't quite hold up which is a nice way of saying it kind of sucks so I thought it might be fun to upgrade the effect and make it Video Copilot quality you know instead of Video Copilot quality uh can you be offended by your own joke I'm gonna think about that in the meantime let's go ahead and get started now one thing to note is I do have the project set to 32 bits per channel so if you hit alt you can toggle through to 32 bits per channel and that's just going to make some of our brightness values a little bit more punchy and give us this brighter boosted light and kind of see the difference here alright so the first thing that we're going to do is take our footage and drop it into a new comp now this can be video or a picture or anything that you want to have as your background but it does help that there's a little bit of an environment and it's a somewhat wide shot so that we can get some nice refraction what I'm going to do is take this layer choose layer pre-compose and move all the attributes and we'll call this background now the reason we want to precompose this is because we're going to be using it in different comps a little bit later next thing I want to do is start creating our drizzle map or our drip map now let's go and take a look at what that looks like this is pretty much the key to this effect is coming up with a realistic map for the raindrops on the glass so let's go back over here to our comp and let's go ahead and create a new solid and we'll call this water drops now we'll come over here to the effects and presets we're going to type in CC particle world and drop that on to our solid by the way just a quick plug for a free video copilot plugin it's called effects console and what it allows you to do is quickly access effects from the keyboard so you can hit a shortcut key and just start typing in the effect you want and just hit enter and it just saves you a few clicks and if you need to add some curves later on or some levels just a handy utility tool that is free and you can check it out FX Console Video Copilot doesn't it alright so we've got our cc particle effect and this is a cool built-in particle plugin in After Effects what I want to do is start playing around with the settings so first of all let's change it to a faded sphere and we'll change the color to white and let's go to the physics and let's change this to twirl and the idea is that we want to get a little bit of side-to-side so let's turn the velocity down really really low like 0.1 and maybe the gravity to 0.1 also we want these to slowly drip down the screen in fact even less than this so let's just lower this even more it's good we'll set the longevity the length of the particles to three and that just changes how long they're on-screen now another thing is that we want the particles to cover the entire screen so we'll go up to the producer and let's scale the X and the y now if I was really lazy I could just end the tutorial right now and just change the name to create a snow effect in After Effects and just turn on the motion blur and then call it an advanced tutorial create advanced snow effects anyway guys thanks so much for watching I'm Andrew Craig alright so the particles are moving a little bit too much side-to-side so I want to turn this extra angle down okay let's set our work area here with N and B in that way we can just focus on this middle area alright so here's our first layer of particles now let's go ahead and duplicate our water drop layer edit duplicate and we're going to call this large water drops so we're just going to make a few tweaks to the settings and these will be our large water drop so we'll turn the size up on these a bit and maybe just have a few and then let's play around with the producer size also which will help to vary the particles from the original now one thing we could do to separate these smaller particles we could lower the gravity even more and that way there's a bit of separation from the two types of particles all right so here are our base water drops and we can come back and make some changes to these a little bit later on but first let's go ahead and create our long streaking water drops that drip down the screen so to do this we're going to create a new solid and we'll make this 200 by whatever the height of the comp is and set the color to white now before we move on let's go ahead and pre compose the layer we're going to leave all the attributes so that the size of the comp stays the same and we'll call this drip layer I'll hit OK so we'll go ahead open it up and what I want to do is take the rounded rectangle tool and we're just going to draw a really thin drip just like that and then want to come over here take the ellipse tool zoom into the bottom here and we're going to create sort of a stretched out the lips and we want this to be just a little bit bigger than the main drip kind of like a matchstick and by the way if you double click on a mask that will allow you to transform it now the other thing I want to do is fade out the top of this mask so in fact let me just drag the top of these points down just a bit and then we'll come over here to the rectangle tool and we'll draw a really large rectangle and choose subtract and then we'll open up the feather properties and we'll just turn this up really high so we're just trying to feather it out but it's also feathering out our tip of our drop so what I'll do is take this and put it below the second mask and that way we have a nice white tip and it fades off this is our base map for our water drop let's go ahead go back to our comp by the way a new thing I like to use is hit tab and left arrow and that will allow you to go back and forth between the comps that you're working on so you can hit tab and go back and forth so kind of handy all right so we have our water drop here and what I want to do is animate it falling from the sky so we'll do is hit P go over here to the start we'll hit P we'll move it up really high even higher than our comp and then we'll move forward maybe to the end and drag it down well past our comp and then we can just look at it and see what the speed looks like we could slow it down a bit maybe by just bringing it down a little bit closer so it looks pretty good so what I want to do now is precompose this so I'm going to choose layer pre-compose move all the attributes and we're just going to call this trip animate it and we're hit okay now I'm going to come over here to the comp switches and you can turn on toggle switches here you want to turn on this little star button here which is called the collapse transformations and when I do that you're going to see that the layer returns to its original size layer and we can actually see it animating but the difference is now if I hit P there isn't a position keyframe because the keyframe is inside of this comp now the nice thing about this is that now I can move it around so what I can do is hit edit duplicate make a copy ctrl D make a copy ctrl D and sort of randomly place these drops around the scene and because of the way that After Effects renders this is a pretty efficient way to do it now I can play around with the speed by selecting a few of them and right-clicking and choosing time time stretch and we could set this to say 125 and that will slow those ones down and create a little bit of variation now the other thing I want to do is I'll just take all of them here and duplicate them and what I want to do is stretch them out and then maybe I'll select a few more and maybe just squeeze them down a bit which sort of randomize them a bit but basically we're just trying to create a bunch of different drops pouring down the screen sometimes it's hard to randomize because you just see so many patterns and then you try to offset and then you upset them equally alright so we've generated all of our raindrops and all of our particles now let's try to work on making it not look terrible now if we look at the final result one thing that we notice is that there's a lot of variation in the type of water drops we have the large ones and the small ones and there's also a lot of displacement and turbulence in the drops themselves and we can also see some displacement in the position all right so what we're going to do is take these drip animated layers and we're going to pre-compose them so we'll choose layer pre-compose and we'll call this water drips and we'll hit okay so what we want to do is add some displacement so we'll come over here and we're going to type in turbulent displace and we'll drop that on to our water drops and immediately we can kind of see what we're after so unsolo those and take a look so what we can do is play around with the way this looks and there's even a few different options here to create some different variations and this already gives it a nice look as if it's dripping down some kind of glass so this is pretty good but we also want to add some smaller details and if we look at the final result we can see some of the variation in the edges of the dripping so what we're going to do is duplicate the displacement and we'll take the top copy and we'll reset it and we'll turn the size down see maybe about 15 and maybe turn the amount down see if we can so this kind of keeps the same pathway as our turbulent displace but just adds a little bit of variation alright so that looks pretty good we'll go ahead and add a fast blur which in this version of After Effects I think is now the Gaussian blur since it's been updated and pretty much the same thing we'll go ahead and put it up here now if you're not comfortable with that you can just change the name of it which is fine also so we'll turn on repeat edge pixels and we'll set the blur maybe to about ten and this is going to come in handy later when we start dimensionalizing our map so we've got our large particles now I also want to add some turbulent displacement to the other particles as well so we'll take the turbulent displace drop it onto the original water drops and let's turn the size down that's pretty good we just want to create a little bit of irregularity in the size and shape that looks pretty good it'll take the large water drops and do pretty much the same thing but maybe not displace them as much since they're a little bit larger in their shape wouldn't change as much all right so now we're going to be using this element to create the refraction and displacement for our water drops so what we'll do is create a new solid that is black and Comp size call this background and hit OK and we'll place this below the water drops and the reason we want to add this is because if we turn on the transparency you can see that these particle effects are see-through in the background so we want to put a black solid so that there is no alpha Channel then I'll take these four layers and we're going to pre compose them and we'll call this the water texture and hit okay so now what we can do is turn it off turn our background layer back on and we're going to add the CC glass effect so we'll take this drop this onto our background we'll open up the surface options select the water texture and right away we get something it's pretty good but I think we can improve on this a little bit so let's go ahead and turn the softness down to zero that helps a bit maybe we'll turn up the displacement really high so that it really looks like a refraction from this effect and maybe turn up the height even let's see here alright I'll go ahead and set this to 90 and 350 so this is just a good starting point also go down to the shading options turn the ambient up to 100% and turn the diffuse specular and roughness and metal down to zero all right so this is a really good start for the effect but now we need to start getting into some more of the technical details that make the water-drops look more realistic so to do that we want to be able to edit the water texture while we see the final result so what I like to do is lock a comp and then double click on the other comp I want to look at and this opens up the other comp and what I can do is just drag it over to the side of the comp panel and now I can look at both of them together now the CC glass effect uses the lightness from our water texture to create the displacement and the refraction so what we want to do is correct our texture to make it look more like water drops and by the way if you hit backslash it opens up the timeline for that comp that you have select or you can just click on it down here now one of the nice things about the way that we created this texture map is that we created all of the elements as separate layers so what we can do is we can select them hit T and this way we can actually change their intensity separately from the other elements to start let's just set them all down to about 15% and this way we can start fading the men to make them more intense or less intense now if we come back to our composite there's one thing that I would like to do and that is fix up the edges of our water so what we'll do is select our background layer and set the track matte to luma matte and you can barely see it but what it's doing is using our water drop layer as the Alpha Channel or as the transparency so let's add a levels effect and what I'm going to do is brighten it up now if we look at the texture itself you can see it here we're brightening it up and then we're just going to cut it off a little bit and we can turn it off and actually see what this looks like so that looks pretty good now I want to be able to see the background so let's take that background layer and hit edit duplicate and we'll put it at the bottom will turn the luma matte off back to no track matte and we'll select the glass effect and delete it so what we've done here is we have our background layer with no effects and then we have our water drops on top of it with the transparency so when we put those two together we can actually see the water dripping down the screen and this is actually looking a lot better now we want the edges to be a little bit more distinctive a little bit sharper in some areas so let's start by playing around with the levels adjustment here all right so this is looking pretty good and we can see some really nice fall-off now because our background is on a separate layer we can go ahead and add a blur so we could either add a box blur which will render really fast or a camera lens blur which will look a little bit nicer so let's turn the repeat edge pixels up and we'll just crank up the radius it's a really nice looking effect but it can be pretty slow so hopefully we won't have to re-render all right so this is looking really nice but let's see if we can refine the look of the water itself so let's select our water layer so we'll call this water all right so our settings are looking pretty good let's go ahead and take a look at our water texture and see if we can refine it a little bit more now we can go ahead and select some of these water drops we could even play with some of the particle settings again maybe increase the birth rate and this will just give us a little bit more density now another thing to change to make the water drops pop a little bit more is if we select the water and choose color correction exposure we can just brighten it up a little bit another thing now I want to color correct is in our texture let's add an adjustment layer so we'll create a new adjustment layer place it below the water drops and we'll choose effect color correction curves and we're just going to play around so it kind of looks like it's a bit pointy so I want to just try to tweak the curve to just flatten that out and rather give it just more that kind of irregularity and of course we're going to play around with the different turbulent displacements which will change the way that the particles look and make a really big difference in the overall feel the other thing we could do is play around with the dripping particles in the way that they look so we could tweak the amount or the size and a lot of these things will really change the way that the water drops look so be sure to play around with the particle settings and the displacement settings that will make a big difference in the overall look alright so now that we have this all set up let's play around with adding a title into the background so we'll go ahead and uncheck this and double click on the background and we could go ahead and start adding it right here so I'll take the text tool will type Video Copilot and this is a really fun fun font let's go ahead do a nice bright orange red and we'll add a glow effect I'm having a really hard time to not use FX console this is my tutorial I could do what I want all right here in saturation all these effects I'm using you can search them over here or of course you can grab FX console let's go ahead desaturate it just a little bit that's nice now to fade this on i didn't just fade it on normally actually did a text effect and i don't remember exactly how I did it but I just took the opacity and animated the range selector so let's go down to the advanced and let's turn randomize order on and we'll set the opacity down to zero and the shape to ramp up and then we can animate these start or let's see maybe offset perfect so we'll keyframe the offset go forward a bit turn that on and it just creates a little different type of a fade up and you can also change the random seed and it'll change which characters turn out first all right so if we come back to our main comp we can see that it is affecting the refraction of our water drops but now we want to rack focus through to the background so the best way to do that is to select the two top layers and pre-compose them move all the attributes we'll just call this the water hit okay and then we'll take the water effect we're also going to add the camera lens blur effect and we'll just go ahead and offset the time so just as it starts we'll keyframe the blur radius from zero we'll move forward a couple of seconds and move it up to maybe about ten if we hit you we can see those two keyframes you can right click on them and choose easy ease then we'll go down here to the camera lens blur set a keyframe for the blur radius hit you move this keyframe over and then set the background to be zero and then the same thing we'll right click easy ease and let's take a look all right so that looks really nice and the other thing we can do I've included this foreground texture that we can put onto the front set this to screen and we could just give it little color correction here maybe set the tint that looks good we just want a very subtle sort of foreground effect and this also we could add a box blur and we could just give a little bit of a rack focus just to fade it out as we rack focus to the back now we could also color correct the entire comp by creating a new adjustment layer we could do maybe a curves adjustment and let's see here and another thing I like to do to give it sort of a color cast is to add a tint effect and change the color in this case we'll do something like a purple and a yellow maybe and this is obviously very extreme but then I just kind of lower the opacity of it so it's just to give it a little bit of a cast and then we could do the curves afterwards and just get some of our contrast back take a look here so yeah like here we want to probably alright so that's looking pretty good and maybe just for good measure a fast blur now Gaussian blur will do like a point five and maybe a noise effect it's funny I really don't know how to use After Effects anymore because I want to go to the menu to demonstrate what I'm doing for the tutorial but then it's easier to click it in here but then I want to use effects console my brain is confused alright so that just helps to sort of take the edge off all right so there you have it a very nice water dripping effect inside of After Effects without any third-party plugins now if you want to try to get the color correction a little bit more like the original you might just give a little bit more blue into the shadows here and then maybe a color correction a hue and saturation and we could get some of those Reds to just slide over to be a little bit more gold right around there so something like that play around this is all very selective alright everyone hope you enjoyed the tutorial it is extremely nice to be back creating tutorials again and believe me this is going to be a very exciting year we are working extremely hard on a bunch of new things and I can't wait to show you everything that we've been doing now in the meantime be sure to follow us on Twitter Instagram we post a bunch of different stuff random stuff all the time and some of it is pretty crazy and of course visit the website Video Copilot dotnet we've been doing some other cool experiments on the blog with different effects combining saber and element 3d [Music] and this year we're going to be posting a lot more project files and downloads and this is one you may have missed for creating cool sweaters and you know maybe you miss it on purpose but either way it's actually got some interesting techniques in the project file so download it and you can kind of take a look at how this is put together so and this also uses just built-in effects of After Effects so anyway guys listen I can't tell you how excited I am to be back doing tutorials again I know it's been insane but this year is going to be even crazier and in a good way and as always download the project file and the material and create the project on your own the best way to learn After Effects is just through experience you just got to get in there and start playing around alright guys thanks so much for watching I'm Andrew Kramer and we will see you next time

Channel: Video Copilot

Views: 1,393,732

Keywords: After Effects Tutorials, No Plugins, andrew kramer, Rain, Dripping, Water

Id: GLwpCNil3XE

Length: 32min 55sec (1975 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 11 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Moas-taPeGheata]

Holy shit this software is mindblowing.

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