I am so dumb! (Slaps forehead!!!!) I've come up with a simple way to make animated rain or snow in Vue (4, 5, 5I or Easel). (Have been looking at this as if it was a complicated problem.) Do we need this any longer, or have others already posted ways to do this?

We need ways to do this, please show us how.

It would be interesting to see the differnece with asilefx tuts.

I saw somewhere that you put your material (rain or snow)on a cylinder and spin it close-up in front of the camera

Attached Link: Expandingwave.com

OK, the simple way to do this, and have it look reasonably realistic was just to make a very long semi-cylindrical assembly of rain droplets, and of "snowflakes"; position this rain cylinder so that the foot is on the ground just in front of the camera, and then animate it so that it drops slowly down. Sometimes the simple answers work best, sigh! This makes for a relatively big rain cylinder object with a high polygon count, but it works quite well, and it looks good in all the atmospheric and lighting conditions I tried. I've made two objects like this for Poser6, and am entering them into the Marketplace in a few minutes - as commercial products. (Imagine! Animated rain in Poser - who would have thought it?) But, for us in the Vue Community, I've made two rain and snow particle cylinders, one each for V4 and V5 (V5I and Easel). These can be downloaded from the site shown as a link here. Free to all Vue'rs. V5I people can animate these in the conventional way, or can use a simple Python script that simply increments these downward in the Z axis. Sample Python scripts are on the V5I CDs. There's a little bit more technical data to know about for the cylinders I've made for us. #1 - The bottom of each has a slightly feathered edge. We can't reasonably make cylinders as tall(long) as people might need for a long animation - too big a file and too many polys. So I've made each as long as I think reasonable, and the feathered edge lets you halt the animation, push the cylinder up to the top of the scene, and then continue the animation. Without acquiring the impression of a "flat bottom" sliding by in the middle of your rain. #2 - I've made the particle density vary a bit in the cylinders - a little more dense at the bottom, where you'd start the animation, and a little less dense at the top. In the real world, rain is rarely the same density over time. Wind usually swirls it about a little bit. #3 - I've done quite a bit of experimenting: I think the resulting back-and-front depth to width ratio of the cylinder is about right for giving a sense of depth to your rain pictures. This gives a better result than the semi-transparent alpha plane with water droplets painted on it, at least for high-quality animations. The "falling snow" is kind of flaky [sic!], but making more realistic "snowflake" shapes supercharged the vertex/poly count. Most people won't have a machine capable of realistic snowflakes. However, if anyone wants more realistic flakes, I'll be quite happy to make some better ones, either this week (April 8th...) or when I return from New Zealand in late May. So, somebody(ies), please try these out and tell me what you think.

Cool! I love weather efx- even thought I don't do animation...

And, its so simple, its embarrassing! When I think of all the hours Dale B and I and undoubtedly other people have spent on complicated solutions.........geesh!

Very Cool, thanks, I've downloaded and will try it... I had two theories which will loop endlessly with even less polys and could look realistic... have a go, and let me know, as I have never needed this nor do I plan on needing it... but I was thinking about it when I went to sleep last night. chop your snow and rain cylinder short, turn it on its side, and put your camera INSIDE, then animate it 'rolling' as if your camera was sitting on the axis of the wheel of snow/rain (centerpoint) of the cylinder, then the weather will just roll and roll... the other option I thought would be cool... create two flat planes (circular if you like) apply your rain snow materials to them (so that you don't see the planes anymore, just the rain or snow), then set them up perpendicular to your camera and rotate them on their axis... one on the right and one on the left, like a pair of binoculars. Overlap them and rotate them to roll in toward the center... the one on the left would go clockwise, and the right plane counterclockwise... Then you can put one plane in front of the other and actually get a depth effect... this could be cool... of course the depth effect could be gotten from the cylinder idea as well, just scale up a copy of your first cylinder and spin it at a different speed about the same axis. After writing all this, I decided it's easier just to draw it, sorry! see attached

Thank you, and interesting ideas, Fuzzy Vision. I've been thinking more about this also. But I'll explain a little bit of the reasoning behind what I did. First thing is that there should be an extremely simple way to animate rain. In Vue (and some other programs), the animation tool works in such a way that the most simple possible animation is to just move an object from one position to another. Rotating an object is a little more complicated. (I wrote out a quick set of instructions for using the rain cylinder in Vue4 and Vue 5 to an absolute beginner, so I know its easier to explain how to just drop a cylinder with two keyframes than it is to explain how to create a rotation.) Second, I ran into a problem of "curvature" early on when I tried something like what you're suggesting. Your first drawing portrays my rain cylinder as hollow. Actually, is is a semi-cylindrical space filled with droplets. And the reason for this is to give the droplets a realistic depth. All the droplets are more or less the same size, but closer droplets will appear larger, and further ones will appear smaller, as in the real world. So, if we put the camera in the middle of the cylinder postioned horizontally, and then rotate the cylinder on that axis, two adverse things happen. One, some droplets will "smear" across the camera face. This isn't too bad a reasult:we can live with this. But, two, the rain droplets become/appear distorted as they curve in from the top, and out again from the bottom, and the curving motion of the droplets is noticable. There may be a way to deal with this that I haven't hit onto. I experimented with several different diameters of cylinders, hoping to create one large enough that any curving distortion wouldn't be noticable. I didn't get any such thing until I had a collection of droplets with at least as many polygons as in the original 'drop-down' cylinder. Nevertheless, there may be a way to do this, and conserve polys. Your second idea is a very good one, and may help me to deal with the problem of how to simulate swirling rain and snow. Got to keep the curvature phenomenon in mind, but instead of making a plane (and throwing away the whole idea of how to create "depth" in the droplets, I can create a somewhat thick disk of droplets, and try something like this. I'll give it a go if I can steal some time tomorrow.