Bring the Rain!

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How to create rain that is useful for stills and animations.

Length:
32 minutes
Software:
Blender 2.5 Alpha
Difficulty:
Intermediate
Rate:
VN:F [1.9.17_1161]
Rating: 4.8/5 (40 votes cast)

In this tutorial you will discover how to:

  • Create realistic rain for animations or stills
  • Add water droplets to the camera lens
  • Drastically reduce your render times with simple rain materials
  • Create a glowing sky

Following on from last weeks snow tutorial, it’s time to delve into rain!

Download the textures used:

At a Glance

Screenshots from the video:

Need some inspiration?

Watch these youtube videos for some creative uses of rain:


Download starter .blend Download finished .blend Bring the Rain!, 4.8 out of 5 based on 40 ratings

About Andrew Price

User of Blender for 9+ years. I've written tutorials for 3d World Magazine and spoken at three Blender conferences. My goal is to help artists get employed in the industry by making training accessible and easy to understand. I'm an Aussie and I live in South Korea ;)
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  • Blender_Noob

    Hi

    Great tutorials !! The only thing is that i am starting to believe, that we can not make animated skydome with moving clouds and sun which we could put in 3D game.Is it even possible with blender or just in UDK?. Couldn’t find any tutorials for this. Thank you in advance.

  • KGyST

    I’ve solved the problem.
    Andy didn’t realize, that, especially at small resolutions, with Blender’s default settings, the smaller droplets fail to move and draw a vertical line, they remain point-like.

    After quite much playing around I realized that setting “Full Sample” under render settings solves most of this problem (some droplets still withstand).

  • sarkhamy

    How do you do tis with cycles?

  • dude

    if you like to listen to music while you do blender and you like Linkin park. check this out :) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMiu8t5e2wk&list=FLD_FHopeYH0L4r_cztBwcdQ&index=1&feature=plpp_video

  • roboguy54

    Hey dude your tutorials are very good….But for a beginner like me its difficult..means how did you draw that bridge with wires??? you directly took that in ur blender…hey i want the list and order of the tutorials from where should i start bcoz i am cimpletely new and dont know a thing…

    • me

      well this is an intermediate tutorial
      so if u r so beginer u should start with the basics first! and u will find tutos for this
      but this tutorial is for artist who are kind of advanced with blender so they know how to model this bridge

  • Giorgio

    Hey. Thanks for the tutorial.
    I was wondering if was possible to get the same effect in a “look out of the window” scene. i’ve a transparent glass but for some reason the vector blur is applied only on half size of the window. i’ve used ztrasparency and i’ve also tried to regulate the z depth by the z offset option in the glass material tab, but nope.
    suggestions?

    • Giorgio

      well, after a month, i can’t understand why the particle system is locked on the layer where my “glass” is. i’ve moved to a separate layer to apply the blur effect, but it is still even on another layer.

  • http://www.ceridwenproductions.com Douglas Bischoff

    Wonderful job! Thank you for sharing this and the others.

    There appears to be a bug in 2.61 or perhaps a change that breaks this tutorial. Stars are showing up on the renderlayer with the Bridge whether you have “Sky” turned on or not. I confirmed this on your final .blend.

    Any thoughts?

  • Fetz

    how move backdrop in node mode?

  • http://www.kgkthamovement.com JTaylor

    can’t u make multiple planes and have the plane for the rain lay above the plane that represents the clouds to block the generating rain effect from happening.

  • Ruben

    Andrew thanks! you´re the best coach to Blender.
    This is my results and animation,the quality of video not is the best because i edited the original animation on a ipod touch 4g and this made bad the finish result.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVlq8Bl1w54&feature=channel_video_title

  • Caleb

    For some reason I cant open the starter blend… when I click the link a bunch of letters appear on another window. I am using a mac if that helps… If someone could tell me how to import that file into blender I would be most grateful.

  • Max Grant

    I am having a problem with the final render when I render it the background image of the clouds will appear. did I do something wrong can someone please help me!

  • http://jeremydeighan.wordpress.com/ Jeremy Deighan

  • Pingback: Bring the Rain « Jeremy Deighan

  • Ry

    Love the tutorial, thank you very much. I don’t know if you ever check these or not, but if I may ask, can you go further into making rain? I don’t understand how to make a scene with rain hitting the ground and building up into a puddle and such.

    This is the only actual tutorial I can find in rain, all the others that say they teach it just link to this one. If you can’t reply, thank you anyway and great tutorial, sorry since I am begging for more help.

  • Tuomas

    Hi Andrew! I have same problem with nemanja. I just can’t get those stars off from the renderscreen. It looks like there’s snowing and raining at the same time! :D Any tips?? Yesterday it worked fine but my blender crashed before I saved my work. Here’s my image so far:

    http://img861.imageshack.us/i/sdfafsdafas.png/

  • Matt

    I followed the composition section, but got confused as my sky effect came infront of the bridge, and you can hardly see it. How do I put the sky to the back as I’m quite new with 2.5

  • darren

    when will you be doing the rain animation tutorial i cant wait.
    great tut by the way.
    thanks.

  • Marc

    AT 14:17
    How do you do that???
    Really, you’ve got to slow down…

  • http://www.victorphellipe.tk/ Victor Phellipe

    Hi,

    Look what I’ve found: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NH_S8iRjzg&feature=related
    At 0:46 this bridge appears! And almost with in this angle! It’s a song from Bliss n Eso.

    Cheers,
    Victor.

  • nemanja

    hey Andrew, questions…. when i turn on the stars and set every thing like in tutorial and press render button they appear on render screen? wtf? im using blend 2.56 beta is that a bug? continuing tutorial is pointless, when i do the thing in composite blur can be seen but also the stars…
    Does anyone read this? Help….

    p.s great tutorial n im looking forward to series of tutorials for beginners

  • http://sonazone.blogspot.com sona sakri

    how to make cloth to human object???

  • http://sonazone.blogspot.com sona sakri

    Type your comment here… Ketik komentar Anda di sini …

  • Rutger

    I almost made it the whole tutorial :P
    Only at the end I became stuck so I just simply quited. I am learning a lot about the compositor however, so I’m just give it another shot tomorow :D

  • http://kamranjawaid.com Kamran Jawaid

    You just made me a blender fan. What was once an inaccessible application became a fun place to experiment on. For that, that you.

  • Michal Zisman

    For some reason, raising the samples amount deosn’t seem to work. I even tried to raise it all the way up… and nothing. It doesn’t change anything.

    Any idea why?

  • Alex

    ok i got it never mind

  • Alex

    When I add the vector blur the rain droplets show up as individual droplets instead of one streak. It’s like it duplicates it or something. Does anyone know how to fix it

    • zac

      How did you fix this ?! :(

  • jeff

    @Luis M, When Andrew moved around quickly at the time you asked about; he right clicked on the sphere then hit the period key which zoomed in then just rotated around using the middle mouse button.
    The menu at 2:14 is the composite screen, there are 2 ways of pulling that up. 1. on the top tool bar where it says default click there and you’ll have access to different screen layouts or 2. use the shortcut which he did, hit ctrl and right arrow. the right and left arrows will cycle you through different screens.

  • Luis M

    Simply amazing… I have a question, I’m new to blender how do you move around so easily with moving any objects? (around 2min…) and as well how do u get that pop up menu?(2.14min in to the video.)

  • Chris

    Great job here, it helped me a lot!!!!

    One question though, I’m trying to add rain to a scene with a moving camera.

    The vector blur node seems to detect the particle speed vector relative to the camera’s frame of reference, and not the world’s. In short, the rain is changing direction as the camera moves around.

    Is there a way to make the speed vectors world-dependent, and not camera dependent?

  • http://www.planetaignis.com Roberto Locatelli

    Thanks a lot for this tutorial. Very useful. The final result have an art appearence, althought it’s photo realistic. Watching the picture I remember movies like Batman, for example. I almost saw him over the tower pillar, on a rainy day in Gotham.

  • http://www.thewashingmachinefilm.co.uk Stu Fletcher

    Hi Andrew, another great tutorial. I suggest adding a some reference material for the compositor (a PDF of a screen grab or perhapsa word doc version). If I muck up the composit it is quite hard to jump back in the video, withour starting again.

    I have bought the Wow factor so maybe it is in there.

    In the Wow Factor you start with a composit but is there a downloadable blend file for it? That would be really helpful.

    Thanks again for your hard work.

  • Gus

    Great tutorial but at the beggining (at 11.20 in the vid) whan i added the back crop ther was no blur but ther wer lines of about 8 behind each drop

  • http://www.benjamindbailey.com/blog Benjamin Bailey

    Toby,

    See this thread: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=158484

    Ben Dansie has a really awesome thing going with his setup.

  • Toby

    can you make one about fire:D? preferably an animated fire:D i need to know for a project at school lol so if you can make it as soon as you can:D thanks and if you already have one can someone tell me:o

  • neoNiV

    AWESOME TUT BRO!

    Finally understand the compositor and just how powerful it is! WOOT WOOT!

    Keep up the great work.

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