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.