creating a png image with raindrop

[Hans Van vliet]

hey,

what kinda realness are you going for? something cartoony, real or hyper real? I had to do something for a kids show once, the words were formed from water drops but each letter was a water drop. Is that what your after or is each letter formed from little drops that stick to the surface of what ever your placing it on?

I can take a stab in the dark, What it sounds like your trying to do is a top view of a word or picture and then you want a drop to land and then reveal the image. That reapeated x 1000 and the whole image is on the screen. You might want to look at making some little animations of water hitting the ground from top view. then use that to drive the transition of the footage/text. as for the actual water falling, you could do that with a particle emmiter and just hang it above the camera .. you wouldn’t need the 2 to match, because it’s more the suggestion .. and I don’t know if it could be done, not with out some serious work .. anyways, hope that helps

..::hunz..

[Ameer]

“the words were formed from water drops but each letter was a water drop. ”
thanx hunz! this is what i am looking for….each letter should be a water drop…any ideas?

[Hans Van vliet]

Hey,

After playing around for a few mins I found that CCBlobbylize will do it. I have to assume your using AE6.5 other then that you could buy the plugin. I could send you my project set up for it if your intrested?
But yeah, Since water isn’t really a texture it’s just the refraction of an image you have to composite your background prior to the text drop in. Then I would recommend doing a poxy or a final render of the BG with out the words.

Drag your background into a new timeline. Duplicate it. Then create a text layer. Use a pure colour (RED / GREEN / BLUE) and type something in. (The order stack is this 1 – Text : 2 – Bg layer : 3 Bg Layer Dupe). Now Go to the middle bg layer (this is the one you want to distort so we’ll be applying CCBlobby to that) Effects > Distort > CCBlobbylize. Then go to it’s effects paramaters .. Blobbiness > Bloblayer (select your text layer for that). Now, slecy property make sure it’s the colour you selected for the font. And turn off your Layer 1 so you can see what’s it’s doing, Now it should look like water. Adjusting the softness blends in the words to make it all join and cut away eats away at the word like it’s soaking into the paper (would need a seperate animation so the paper actually looked like it got wet to sell that one :P). Other then that, Light and Shading should be easy to guess … you can turn on layer 1 [text layer] for a reference ..

The only thing it’s lacking is well, after shocks, like wobbles but I’m guessing you could use the warp distort to give it a nice waking look and wobble. Other then that I’m not really sure 6.0 can do it with out a lot of work .. but it’s not to complex to do by hand .. Good luck hope that helped .. and if you need the file let me know, I can put it online.

..::hunz..

[Ameer]

Thank Hunz, i guess i have to buy the plugin,
but anyways..thanks a bunch for all the info..just a quick one, since i am not really a expert in AE, i would like to know how do i render a mov file from AE which should be transparent so that i can use it in my flash movie.? right now it comes with a background..
ameer.

[Hans Van vliet]

Hey,

I was looking around for a rain on camera lens effect and found that blobbylize can be used for that so I quickly put together a test for you using a text reveal. I know you prolly can’t use it because it has CCblobbylize in it but it’s here for when you get the CC (which comes free with 6.5 but you have to install it seperately). Also included a movie …

http://www.hunz.com.au/raindrop/raindrop.mov
http://www.hunz.com.au/raindrop/RainDrop.rar

As for your other question, if your using it with flash you might want to output a .png seq. but just make sure you have RGB+ or RGB+ALPHA selected when you render. So, you’ve added it to the render que .. then from the drop down menu is the standard so you press on that, select and set up your output … Then hit render. Make sure you have nothing on the bottom layer, and then it’ll render with a nice alpha and like I suggested if you want use .png those things pop right in to flash plus it can compress them back with a .jpg algo if you need them to be on the web ..

Anyways, hope this helps.

..::hunz..

[Ameer]

thank you so much hunz, for all your help.
kind regards,
ameer.