Creating Rain Drop Ripples on Water

[Mark Suszko]

A particle generator like Wondertouch is good for this. Or buy some real water drop footage and composite it into the scene. I suppose you could write an expression in AE to generate random spots in the scene with a decay rate for ripple genratino and fade out. I imagine someone’s made a plug-in for that already somewhere though I don’t have a source in mind.

[Remington Mcelhaney]

Okay, thanks. Do you think you could use a particle system like trapcode? I’m not sure if you can link animations as particles.

[Stuart Elith]

Within particular you can have animations as the particles, by specifying “Custom” under the particle settings, and you get various options to tweak there.

However when you are using an Aux system (which would be best so that when the raindrop particle hits the ground, the ripple would form) you can’t specify a different custom particle… so I don’t think you can create the best situation which would be a raindrop particle which hits the ground, then plays the ripple animation there.

You could just create the ripple animation and have a lot of them playing on the water surface randomly… wouldn’t line up with the actual raindrops but still might work convincingly depending on your needs.

[Remington Mcelhaney]

Thanks, I appreciate your help. That’s probably what I’ll end up doing.

[Graham Proctor]

Hi,

Not sure if this is what you are looking for, but when I want to get that ‘drops in a pool of water’ look on something I do as follows:

Effect>Simulation>CC drizzle

Looks fab. You have to play around a bit with the parameters to nail it just right. A good way to get a feel for it is to just do it on a dark solid.

Anyway…hope that helps.

Best

Graham Proctror