Water Drop sliding down the camera lens

[Mike Clasby]

Here is an earlier post for a raindrop running down an apple, using Blobbyize and a masked layer (drop shape) as alpha:

https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/2/898170

It makes a nice drop, but, if you sub in our vid layer (what the lens sees) it will look like the drop is running down the inside of the lens, or like a drop was running down the inside of a window. What you want I think, is a drop running dowthe outside of our lens, not the inside, and I can’t get the shading to reverse, so that the brightness is on the outside of the drop, which is how I think it should look to be correct.

[Rutger]

Maybe this is obvious, but I think the key to make this look convincing is that you use the drop that you are making as a displacement map for the animation behind it. I am assuming that you really don’t want to see the raindrop on the lens, but rather the distortion it gives of the city behind it. I saw it once in an animation where a camera started underwater and rose out of the waters showing an island or something like that. You could not actually see that the camera was wet, but the distortion of the image made this very clear, I thought it looked cool at least….

So all I would say is that you still need a convincing looking animation of a droplet running down the lens in grayscale. Then I would make the layer invisible, select your 3D city layer, then use effect>distort>displacement map and use your droplet layer as the displacement map. Then select lightness or so for horizontal and vertical displacement.

Again, I hope this was not obvious already.

Rutger