3.2 How to Customise the Rain

Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Rainy Window Effects Course. In this lesson we'll learn how to edit the look of our raindrops. So you can see in the preview window here how our animation is really starting to take on the look of a rainy window. Now we can start getting into the small details and adjusting our Raindrop Map even further to make our rain look just a little bit more realistic. Now the CC Glass effect uses the Lightness property from the Raindrop Map to create the refraction and the displacement of the rain. Because of this, we want to adjust our Raindrop Map in order to edit the look of our rain. Now for us to do this, we need to see how our adjustments are affecting our final animation here. So let's go ahead and firstly, let's change the name of this composition here because we've got two range of map compositions. So this one, we can rename this as rain animation. All right, click OK. So now we have the rain animation composition and the Raindrop Map composition. So let's make it so that we can see the final animation by locking this comp here. So to do this we need to click on this toggle viewer lock icon here to lock this in place. And now we're going to double click on the comp that we want to edit, which is the Raindrop Map here. So now let's go ahead and double click on the Raindrop Map comp. And now this will bring up the Raindrop Map in the preview frame. And you'll notice how that we have both comps open up here. So we can now move the Raindrop Map by clicking and dragging the panel, and dropping it to the side drop zone here, where it highlights in blue. And now you'll see that we can see both comps in the middle, which will be extremely useful and save a lot of time, instead of having us to move back and forth between looking at both comps. So we're in our Raindrop Map. Let's start by lowering the opacity of the particles here. So let's go ahead and open all these up. So let's highlight all of these and open up the transform menu here. And let's bring all of these down to about 15% to 20%. So let's bring that down to 15%. And the same for the large drops and the same for the small ones. So now that they're all 15% straightaway, you'll see how this affects the look of our final composition here. So you can use both preview windows to start playing about with the opacity values here until you find a look that you like. So now back in our rain animation comp here, let's go ahead and zoom into it. So let's use the mouse wheel to zoom into these raindrops here. I'm just using the space bar to move around the preview window. You'll see that we get these sort of quite hard edges for our rain. Now we can fix this by selecting our background layer and then setting the track mattes in this drop down menu here to Luma Matte. Now this will make it so that this is using our Raindrop Map as a transparency. Now, if we add a levels effect to our Raindrop Map layer, so let's go ahead and go to Effects. Color correction and then choose levels. Now, we can begin to brighten it up by moving the right arrow all the way. So if we zoom out here a little bit, so we can see how this is affecting our animation. In fact, let's go ahead and fit it to 100%. And then let's go ahead and continue to move this arrow all the way to the left, like so. And you can see how this is affecting our animation. But if we go ahead and click on the i icon here and switch it on, you can see what the rain or how is it affecting our Raindrop Map. Now in order to see the background layer again, let's go ahead and duplicate this background. So Ctrl+D to duplicate the background layer. And then now let's drag it to the bottom. Now let's turn off the Luma Matte. So No Track Matte here. And then select the glass effect in the effects control. And we just want to remove it. Cool, now, this will turn our background in here into a normal layer. And now I can see if we turn off the Raindrop Map, now we can see our background and we can see the water droplets moving, Down the window again. And let's go ahead and click on the Play button on the Preview to see what this looks like. And you can see that we're starting to get a more realistic look for our raindrops. Cool, so let's go ahead and go back to our Raindrop Map here. And we can adjust the look of it even further. So just making sure that you really get the look that you want, moving it ever so slightly to bring out the edges of the water. So if we zoom in here you can see we're bringing the edges out. Or we can move them further apart like so to make them softer. So let's bring them close together just to bring out the edges again. Cool, let's fit this to a 100%. Now because this background layer here is no longer being used as a background anymore, we can go ahead and rename this. So right click, Rename, and let's name this Water adjustment. So we'll use this as our water adjustment layer. To make sure that this is selected and we can go ahead and add a color correction to this. So go to Effects > Color correction and select Exposure. And now we can increase the exposure value here to make the rain pop out even more. So let's just increase this ever so slightly, so maybe to about 0.4. Let's go with 0.4. Now that we have our background, we can also go back to our Raindrop Map to refine the look of the rain a little bit more. So in our second window here, let's select Raindrop Map again. And things that you can do at this stage is things like going back to our CC particles. So go back to our large drop maps here, so let's select these one at a time. And you can see our CC particle world and turbulent displace effects here that we can go ahead and adjust the values such as birth rates, particle size, and things like that. We can also add a new adjustment layer to this composition. So let's go ahead and go to Layer > New adjustment layer. And let's go ahead and place it below the squiggly streaks. And now let's go ahead and choose Effect > Color Correction, and let's choose Curves. And now we can play about with the curve line here to remove any sort of sharpness in our rain. So if we go ahead and zoom in a little bit. We can adjust the slide here like so, and just remove any sort of sharpness we have in our ranges to make it a little bit softer, just to appear a little bit softer, like so. So just going back to the original composition here, rain animation composition. I want to make the rain drops seem a little bit more 3D. So let's pop them out a little bit more, increase the edges, and bring this arrow further to the right here, like so. So bringing them ever so slightly close together. You can see how that sort of bringing out these edges slightly. And now we can also go back to our Raindrop Map. And moving onto our adjustments layer. And then just seeing how the curves can affect this. So just adjusting it a little bit more like so. Bringing this up a little bit so we can get a little bit more these water droplets to show up in our composition. And with these water droplets here, let's bring them up a little bit more. So let's bring them to about 20%. And then just playing with the opacity a little bit here. See what this looks like. And you can see that bringing the opacity and a little bit more makes them appear, A little bit more in our composition. And we can do the same with the streaks. So if we want the streaks to appear a little bit more, let's bring them out to about 25% and see how that affects the look of our rain animation. Cool, so we can bring, let's have a look and see what that just playing about with the way this all looks and adjusting it until you find something that you like. So once you're happy with all the adjustments that you've made to things like the Raindrop Map and the particle effects here, so things like the longevity, the birth rates, the opacity, and also in the adjustment layer. And once you're happy with the way that looks, let's go ahead and click on the Play button on the preview over here just to see what it looks like. Great, so when you have the look of your rain completed, in the next lesson we'll learn how to create a neon sign in our background. Where the light will really help sell the look of our rain as it refracts in the water. See you all there.