Making CG rain with Trapcode Particular

[Viacheslav Sasykin]

You can create rain using CC Rain filter which is already included in AE. Also there are a number of filters that are not included in AE but dedicated to rain, like T_Rain (included in Tinderbox 4 plug-in from Foundry). Why would you need Particular for that?

[Mike Zimbard]

It depends on the level of realism you want to achieve. In my opinion Particular can give you a much more realistic rain because you can create it in true 3D space and fly an AE camera through it. I’ve never used Tinder 4s rain so I don’t know how it compares, but CC Rain is very flat and unrealistic unless you create many instances of it to simulate depth. I like to set up a box emitter with a wide X and Z radius in Particular that roughly matches the depth of whatever background plate I’m working with. Then it’s a matter of playing with the motion blur settings to control the look of the streaks. Depending on whether you want a slight drizzle or a heavy downpour, you can vary the birth rate and also mix in turbulence to simulate wind gusts. Good luck!

[Viacheslav Sasykin]

Rain with Particular looks slightly better than generated with CC Rain, but if you are novice to Particular you will have to spend a quite some time trying to make it look better than with CC Rain. BTW, flying through the Particular’s rain you are basically zooming in into the rain streaks and it does not look good if you are going for high level of realism. For highest possible level of realism just take your camera and go shoot your scene outside when it’s raining. My point is for the most of the cases CC Rain is enough.