I'm relatively new to animation/ modeling, but I'm working on a project which includes many scenes of heavy rain. I have vue 6 infinate and am using poser 7, the standard vue cylender method looks pretty cheesy, I also have an important shot involving rain splashing in water (with ripples), and would love to have animated drips off of faces, I'm curious about 2 products, both are poser-based found on this site "stormy rain" by forester, and one from "Jepe's movie props" the first is a prop based effect (which would eat polygons) and the other consists of AVI plates. I think it could be possible to do this also with poser physics and dynamic materials, but I've been apprehensive to get into the dynamic materials, and do not own poser physics. I'd greatly appreciate any advice on this....thanks

vue to the best of my knowledge cannot do most of this. the parts with rain hitting the water or running down surfaces are just not possible. these effects are hard to achieve even in top programs like 3d max. I my self how ever would try to go at the other part in post production. places like http://www.animationsforvideo.com/html/overlay_effects.htm can give you a what you need.

Attached Link: Create Rain with 3D Max

I have also heard of Ripple Rain by Kerlin Softworks. http://www.caligari.com/Products/trueSpace/ts5/plugins/caligari/FXPak/default.asp?Cate=Caligari

I my self ask the same question. And i got good answers. There's trick someone told me. You use 3 cylinders, put them together and apply one of the included Vue textures. It looks good i think.

Hello wushen.

I made a couple of rain models that are long sets of rain drop meshes that can be very simply "animated" in Vue by dropping the set (a single object) slowly down before the camera. The rain drop meshes in the set consist of thousands of individual droplets and streaks, and they are of different densities, depending upon how heavy the rain needs to be. The "set" is generally cylinderical in shape so that it can be used at any horizontal angle relative to the camera - and it is fairly deep so that the rain drops will look photo realistic, and will catch light and cast shadow accurately. 

For Vue, I have posted this as a free object. I am away from home at the moment, but will try to locate the download link and post it here as soon as possible.

Splashing rain drops are an entirely different matter. When the rain drops impact a solid surface and "splash", it is because they are breaking into small bits upon impact and are bouncing upward. It is possible to create meshes that look like this in both the static form (and in animation form if you have Maya, MAX, XSI or Lightwave), but this is done by creating thousands and thousands of polygons. So, there has not been a lot of call for this kind of product.

The splashing rain drops in still mesh form are available in that "Stormy Rain" product. There are versions available for Vue and for Poser. (I don't remember if both versions are available here on Rendo, but I think I can access both versions from my own web site if you want one of those.) And the versions of splashing rain in that product package consist of light rain, medium density rain, and heavy rain (both slanted and coming straight down). That product package also contains sets for ripples that can be placed on the ground or a pond surface or something like that.

Creating an animation of splashing rain in Vue can only be done through a fairly laborous process at the moment. (Again, because what you are seeing is hundreds of rain droplets come up from a surface where one has impacted.) There are some ways we can simulate this if you don't require a high degree of realism, if you are not going to need a close-up view of the splashes, and if you have a reasonably powerful computer.

I would have to build several sets of splashing rain still meshes, which I don't mind doing, and if you are going to animate these, you will have to work out a method for subsituting one set for the other at set keypoints. (Or if you have Vue 6 I, it is fairly easy to work out a Python script for this.) Actually, I can build at least one set for a close-up splashing rain - but you won' t want very very much of this because of the very high polygon count involved.

In the past, it has not been reasonable for me to build much in the way of splashing rain models because most people did not have powerful enough computers to use them. But this situation has changed in the last few years, and I am willing to construct these if people want them. Just let me know.

By the way, I am using the Realflow program to build these things - just so that you know you will be getting models and meshes that are physically accurate.

Hmmm, ok, the Stormy Rain product sold here in Renderosity consists of the models in *.3ds file format - these can be used in Vue and in Poser 6 and 7. 

With regard to the sets of raindrops that you can animate, apparently I removed the versions for Vue from my web site. No downloads for a long time, so I took them off. However, if you go to the download link given below, you can download some simple versions that I made for Poser people. These are both in *.obj file format, but you can import them ito Vue.

http://www.expandingwave.com/downloads/w_long_rain/

You'll want to assign them the Clear Water material. Basically, just pose the bottom of this rain object on the terrain, and then make a very straightforward animation so that the object moves downward in front of the camera.

If you want anything more elaborate ( a longer mass of water objects, more dense rain, and so forth), just send me an e-mail at forester@mountainflight.us