How to Create Realistic Rain

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Discover how to create realistic rain with particles and dynamic paint.

Length:
44 minutes
Software:
Blender 2.61
Difficulty:
Advanced
Rate:
VN:F [1.9.17_1161]
Rating: 4.7/5 (174 votes cast)

In this tutorial you will discover:

  • How to use Dynamic Paint
  • The best particle settings for rain
  • How to use bump, mirror and color maps

Dynamic Paint is here! In case you missed the hype, dynamic paint is a new feature in blender that allows objects to paint each other. This opens the door for things like animated snow footprints, smoke interaction, fluid wet maps and, you guessed it… rain!

In this tutorial I will be showing you how to create realistic rain that interacts with it’s environment.

If a rain sounds like a familar topic to you, that may be because I created a rain tutorial just 18 months ago. But I’m doing it again because the old tutorial didn’t include any interation with the environment. So I’m hoping you don’t mind a repeat :P

Finished Result

Download the starting .blend file Download the finished .blend file

At a Glance

Screenshots from the video:


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How to Create Realistic Rain, 4.7 out of 5 based on 174 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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  • Lion C.

    Hey Andrew,

    this is a really nice tutorial, but you forgot to add it the ‘wheater’ category under ‘themes’ :-)

    Greetings,

    Lion C.

  • Nick Faletra

    Hey Andrew,

    Awesome tutorial. As always. I thought I would leave a comment to help people understand what you meant by the texture resolutions bring “divisible by 4.”

    It’s actually powers of 2. Like 2 to the 8th power equals 256. 2 to the 9th is 512. Think exponential increases.

    The reason for this is your graphics hardware likes powers of 2 and will process it faster. On older hardware, if your texture dimensions were not powers of 2 then you would get some wacky artifacts. GPUs handle this a lot better now, but powers of 2 are still preferable for efficiency.

    Hope that helps the English speaking viewers.

    Cheers

  • Mark

    I seem to have followed everything(?) but when I check the folder all the images are black, has anyone seen this before?

  • ratstance

    can this be done in cycles?

  • Rome723

    Nice toutorial!

    Here is an, in my point of view, little improvement:
    Set the IOR(Index of refraction) in the material settings to 1.33, as the IOR of water in real world is 1.33. It gives some really nice reflections and makes it look more realistic.

  • Angus McCarroll

    it may be blue because it was for painting, not rain.

  • marcus

    Thanks so so much.. i love your tuts.. love your work .. and I wanted to say Its so cool to see a young Auzie so into this art form..P.S. Wish I still lived in Briz as it would it would have been way cool to hang with! say hi to your cat dog n dog cat
    lol

    • Eccy

      AUZIE? The fuck an AUZIE? It’s AUSSIE, or for tarded peoples like you, ASSIE!

  • http://www.facebook.com/amr.elsayed.1804109 Amr Elsayed

    hi andrew

  • monoo mankar

    Awesome awesome and just awesome.. I have no words to explain that how can i say you are just superb……. Andrew you are just amazinG… You really have good imagination power because in this virtual world we just have to imagine that how it can be done, and what will be perfect for it…. I am just loving it…. :)

  • http://derek1906.site50.net/ Derek

    I don’t know why, but, the raindrops look more like snow to me… just saying. Other than that, great tutorial!

  • Felix

    Hey Guys!

    At first, thanks to Andrew Price for this Tutorial!

    But i got a Problem at Blender. I did every step just like Andrew, but if i try to bake the Canvas on my Floor, Blender says “Bake failed: Canvas mesh not updated.”
    Does anyone knows what to do?

    I used my own scene, and my floor is a “room” with one open side. Like I said, did every step just like Andrew. Hope someone got an Idea.

    • maxx makku

      dude just do that after switching to Object mode ; there will be no error message

  • Tom P

    Hi Andrew,

    Great tutorial as always!

    One note as to why a lot of values in particular textures are packed in powers of 2 (256, 512, 1024, 2048, etc.) is because those are even “bit” values. 8-bits on the hardware is 256, add another bit, 512, etc. This makes the computation much faster to work.

    Thanks!

  • http://- Martin P

    Hello Andrew, I just love your tutorials.
    And in this one I have a lot of fun when I started changing some option… for example.. gold rain or something like that. :)

    Thank you, very much.

  • Evan J

    Can not get the rain in Blender 2.6 to show up in the render image setting. I am using a daylight scene. Any help or suggestions?

  • chase

    Hey Andrew, Looks to be a great tutorial.

    Can i ask a favor though – I see it is posted on Vimeo and you have it checked off not to allow downloads of it.

    Some of us poor folk in the States can’t afford the high cost of a internet connection on the home front. And not having one we have to download the tutorials / videos so we can view them at home later.

    I’d really like to follow along and try this one. Would you mind allowing it to be downloaded as with some of your others.

    Thanx

  • reza

    thanks a lot andrew

  • sharif

    Many thanks for this…….i will request please more video tutorial upload.

  • http://fajrulfalahtv.blogspot.com/ Fajrul Falah TV

    I Like It (y) :) Blender Introduction to Dynamic Paint – Rain (y) (y) (y) (y) (y)

  • Erich Toven

    Here is my crack at it..
    I changed around some things..

    Andrews is probably still better. :(

    http://youtu.be/6e1Xb9lPfMU

  • http://www.tony.net Tony

    Andrew,

    All I can say is thanks! You are wonderful…. Now I can do this with the best of them! Once I see what to do (the basics) I’m off and running. I spent three weeks working on my latest creation after you inspired me. Your rain effect worked much, much better than mine and truly made my work look nearly photorealistic. I plan on sharing it when I find a way to post this enormous file somewhere for people to check out.

    My latest short blender movie (3.5 minutes with an original score of mine) is rain turning into slush, turning into sleet, turning into snow and the snow accumulating then a man walking across the scene leaving footprints in the blowing snow. (I even have a cabin with snow sliding off of the metal roof and the weight of the snow bending branches etc.)

    The only problems are baking times, rendering times and the MASSIVE file size! The file is nearly 2gb!

  • Ernesto

    Thx for all your great tutorial Andrew.
    Here is my fnal result http://youtu.be/HbamIoh-6PY

  • john

    guys Blender rejects me i don’t know why. am trying by all means to know it, but the more i try the more it puzzles me… i need help. actually what is blender renderer man? should i download it too.. for my render to render successfully?

  • Faouzi

    Thanks a lot Andrew for your great tutorials! I’m a big fan of your works..

  • Alex

    Any way to loop this animation?

  • http://grafiquero.wordpress.com Fabián Vargas

    this is a complex and great tutorial..!!!!

  • Margaret Toigo

    Thank you for this wonderful tutorial, as well as the .blend file with the background already done. I’d like to learn how to model realistic scenes like this one, but I’m sure that such a tutorial would be several hours long — and the point of this one was particles and dynamic paint.

    Here’s how mine came out (it took 7 hours for Blender to render 200 PNGs in full 1080i, then I used Motion to put it together and Final Cut Pro to add sound and credits):

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4bXN7SiPJM&list=UUSQW5yQopww_ukL1FAHIExA&index=1&feature=plcp

  • landon

    when i render it out it looks great on my computer but it sucks on youtube/facebook yours looks as great as it does on the computer how?

    • Brandon Morgan

      Whenever you put photos or animations/renders on sites like youtube or facebook it automatically reduces the image quality. I don’t know if deviantART does. But the image quality shouldn’t change just from your computer.

    • Gilian

      Just if you render do the output in a better formate.

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