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.