2.2 Rain Droplets

Hi everyone, and welcome back to the rainy wind of effect course. In this lesson, we'll learn how to create the rain droplets for our rain drop map. Back in After Effects, we can now go ahead and input the files, so let's go to File > Import > File. Find where your image is, select it and make sure that you don't have create composition ticked as we're already working on the range of map composition. Select import and now we have our background image imported into our project. Awesome, now we're all ready to start creating our rain drop map. So if I go ahead and import the rain drop map here again. We can drag this into our composition. And then you can see here that there are quite a few elements involved. We've got these sort of glowing white spots and squiggly lines, which will be our rain streaks that are moving down, streaking down the window. Now if we go ahead and click on the Preview button here, you can sort of see how this animates, like so, you can sort of see how it's sort of squiggling down and how it's sort of resembling rain on a window. So let's go ahead and delete this as we won't need this at the moment. So let's go ahead and begin creating our rain drop map by creating those small spots which we saw in the previous video. Now in order to create these, we need to use CC Particle World which is a great particle generator that's built into After Effects. So first we need to create a new solid. So go to Layer > New, and Solid. And we'll call this one Large Drops. Make sure that the new solid is selected. So, let's go ahead and make sure that the new solid is black first of all. Click ok. Make sure that it's selected and then we want to go to Effect, And go to simulation and now go to CC Particle World. So this will add the particle world to our solid. So, alternatively, you can also type in CC Particle World in the effects and presets here. So let's type that in, CC Particle World and this goes for any other effects that you're looking for, by the way. So if you know the name of any sort of particular effects that you're looking for, simply type it in here. And then once you found it, you can drag click and drag it into the layer here, like so. Just go ahead and delete that Particle World as we only need one of them. So now that we've added CC Particle World to the solid, you can see straight away how this affects our composition in the preview window here. Now if we scrub backwards and forwards in the timeline, you can see that we've got this sort of firework animation, which we can edit and use to form our water drops. So let's go ahead and play with the settings over here. Now the first thing we want to do is we want to change the birth rate from 2 to 1, and the longevity from 1 to 10 seconds as we want the water droplets to last for the majority of the animation. Next, we want to open up the Particle settings here, and we want to change the Particle Type here from a Line to a Faded Sphere. Now you can see straight away how that changes the look of our particles. And you can also sort of experiment with the different sort of particles here just to have a look at what else is available. So we want to have a faded sphere for our water droplets. And now we want to change the birth size to nought point seven and the death size to nought point four. The size variation will keep at 50% and the max opacity will keep at 75%. Cool, now down here, we can change the death and birth color. So let's go ahead and change these to white. So let's drag that up here, and same with the death color. Change it to white. And then next we wanted to go to the physics, so let's close particles and go to physics and we wanted to change the animation type from explosive to twirl just to get a little bit of a more randomized and side to side movement for our particles. Now you can check how this animation changes it by moving backwards and forwards along the timeline like so. And now let's go ahead and change some of these other settings here. So velocity, we want to change it to nought point nought one. Gravity, we want to change that to nought point nought nought two. And Extra, we'll just put that to 50. And then Extra Angle, we'll put this at 8.5 degrees, so let's change that. Like so. Cool, now, let's go ahead and look at the directional axes. So let's a look at this, now for the y, we want to keep it at minus 1, and for the gravity vector, we want to change this to nought point 5. Great, now the next thing we want to do is we want to make it so that the particles cover the whole screen now, you can see that the particles are sort of clumped together at the moment. They're all sort of clumped together on the screen. So let's go ahead and open up the producer settings. So go to the producer, and we want to scale up the x and y values. So let's go ahead and go to radius one, we want to put this at 1.5, like so and that will sort of stretch it all the way out to the sides. And then the radius for y, we want to put this at 1. And that will scale it all the way up, so if we zoom out here, you can see how that's affected our particles and you can sort of adjust the way it looks by clicking and dragging backwards and forth from here like so. Let's keep it at that for now. And then for the position Y, we want to put this at minus nought point one just to add a little bit of depth to our particles. Cool, and lastly for radius, let's change this to nought point one. Cool, so, now let's take a look at what this looks like. So, let's go and fit this to the screen and we can click on the Preview button here to see what this looks like. Excellent, next we want to add some turbulent displace to make the drop shapes look a little bit more natural and random. So let's go ahead and close Particle World. Make sure that large drops solid or the large drop layer is selected and we want to go to Effect > Distort, and let's find turbulent displace and click that. Alternatively, again, you can go ahead and search for it in the effects and presets search bar here. And now let's go ahead and change the options over here. So, for the amount, we want to keep that 50. Size, you want to reduce the size, so let's put that at about 30. And then for the rest of it, we can keep it the same at the moment. So let's keep it at that and you can see how with the turbulent displace, it sort of added this sort of natural looking effect for our particle so it's not so perfectly round, cool. So once we're happy with the way this looks, we want to duplicate this layer. So let's close this at the moment. And let's go ahead and duplicate the large drops layer by pressing Control+D on the keyboard. And let's go ahead and change the duplicate name. So let's Right-click this, rename this and let's rename this small drops. And we're gonna make a few adjustments to this layer here, just to help give the animation of the water drops little bit more variety. So starting with the birth rate, let's change it to nought point 2, the longevity to 7. And you can play about with the producer settings here as well. So let's go ahead and change these a little bit, just to randomize it a little bit more. Like so. And then to the physics, let's go ahead and change the velocity to nought point nought one. And the gravity to nought point nought nought one. And the directional axis, let's change this to nought point five so the axis y's nought point five. And let's see the gravity vector, we'll change this from nought point five to one. Cool, now let's change the actual particles. So let's go to the particle settings and let's change the birth size from nought point seven to nought point five and the death size from nought point four to maybe nought point three. Cool, and now let's go to the turbulent displace. Let's change the size from 30 to 10. And let's go ahead and play with the extra values here in Particle World. And let's go ahead and change the seedm so from here, we can change the value from zero to something like five and that will automatically randomize the particles. So it looks completely different from what it was originally. Great, so now that we have some water droplets for our raindrop map, in the next lesson, we'll learn how to create some rain streaks. See you all there.