2.4 Rain Streaks Animation

Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Rainy Window Effect course. In this lesson, we'll learn how to animate the rain streak that we created in the last lesson. So here, we have our first rain streak. Now, if we go back to our original comp called the Raindrop Map by clicking on the tab herel. You can see that we have our rain streak right in the middle amongst all our other particle effects here. So let's go ahead and hide these small and large drops by clicking on the eye icon next to each layer here. Just so that we can focus on the streak. Now, make sure that we move the timeline to the beginning. And then making sure that we've got the water streak comp selected, press P on the keyboard. Now, this will access the position options for our rain streak. So we can now use this to animate the rain streak by creating keyframes for the position. So using the Selection tool at the top here, let's go ahead and zoom out. And we want to move our rain streak all the way at the top here. And then click on the keyframe icon to create a keyframe at the beginning of our timeline. And now, let's move the timeline to the very end. And we want to move the streak all the way to the bottom here, creating another keyframe at the end. Now let's go ahead and preview this animation, just to see what the falling speed looks like. So let's click on the Preview button here. And you can see that it's falling at a fairly slowish rate. Now, if you want to slow the speed down a bit, we can go back to the timeline, go back to the keyframes. And we can bring the position of the keyframes close together. So let's bring the position of this drip close to here, like so. And then at the end here we can also move this closer like this. And now, if I click on the Preview button, you'll notice how the streak is moving slower. So if you wanna slow it down a bit, move the keyframes close together. Or if you want to speed the animation up, move the keyframes further apart. Once you're happy with this speed of the streak, we now want to go ahead and precompose it. So let's go ahead and go to Layer. So select the water streak, go to Layer, and Precompose. And make sure to select Move Attributes into the new composition. And we'll call this Water Streak Animated, and then click OK. Now, back in our raindrop map composition, we want to make sure that the comp switches are turned. So you can turn them on at the bottom here, so let's go ahead and click on Expand or Collapse the less which is pane. You can see now that we've got our switches here. And we want to click on the star icon at the top here next to our Water Streak Animated. So if we bring our streak back into the animation, if we click on the star icon here, this is the Collapse Transformations button. Now, keep your eye on the transformation border here. So if I switch it off again, you'll see that it is the size of our composition. But once you turn it on, you'll notice that it returns to its original size which was in the water-streak comp. So, this is the size that of this, and now that is the size in our composition. Now, what we can do now is we can duplicate this layer by pressing Ctrl+D on the keyboard. And now we can start moving it about on the screen. And this is a really quick way of filling up the screen with multiple water streaks. And then we can go ahead and press the Preview button over here to see what that looks like. Excellent, now if we bring this timeline back here a little bit, we can also choose to change the speed of some of these streaks to create some variations. So by holding Shift on the keyboard, we can select a few of these streaks like so. And then we want to go ahead and right-click on that, go to Time. And select Time Stretch. And here we can set it to a larger number, something like 150, and that will slow those selected streaks down. Another way that we can create some variations of streaks is by selecting some more like so. And then duplicating them by pressing Control+D on the keyboard, move them around to a different area of the composition. And then let's go ahead and make those longer by stretching them. So let's go ahead and select the trend going to the Transform menu here. And in Scale, you can deselect the constraint proportions. And now, you can stretch them a little bit, like so. And you can also do the same, duplicate these, and move them out about to another area, like so. And now with these ones, select them by holding Shift on the keyboard. We can also shrink them like that. So you can also use the Selection tool here to stretch them, or shrink them, like so. Now, once you've done that, you can spend a little bit more time placing your streaks up and around the screen. So that's the zoom out here, and then just select some of these like so. Control+D, and just move some of these up. So we've got a constant stream of streaks, From the beginning and, oops, so duplicate these, and at the bottom here, like so. So now you see we've got more of a constant stream of streaks as we move through our timeline. And then just scrub backwards and forth through the timelines, just to see how it all animates, or just clicking on the Preview button here. Cool, now let's go ahead and fit this to screen again. And we can now bring our waterdrops back. So let's go ahead and click on the eye icons for these particles again. And now, by pressing on the Preview button here, you can also test how it all looks together. Great, so now we have our basic raindrop map animating. In the next lesson, we'll go through how to adjust the look of the streaks, just to give them a more natural and realistic look. See you all there.