Here we have the final render, overall I'm rather satisfied with the look I managed to achieve. The rain itself and the atmosphere manage to capture the look I was after. However the fog effects could be better, although this is in part due to having to find a solution that wouldn't take too long to render aswell.
In taking this effect further I would like to refine the actual rain and perhaps use some more scripting to add in a bit of random behaviour for the particles (to simulate the wind changing perhaps). Also I would like to improve the fog, aswell as add a lightning bolt or some kind of dramatic moment.
Using the volume fog technique I have created clouds in the sky to help create a sense of depth aswell as adding some more visual interest. I have also tweaked the lighting in order to more accurately reflect the darker IBL and to get a moodier and more realistic result. The final render is currently in progress and shall be uploaded shortly, once it is complete.
So, this is a still from what the final render will look like, beyond tweaking. The fog itself will be animated and If I have time Id like to darken the sky a bit (with another volume primitive probably), and perhaps add a flash of lightning.
Well, after running through a few different ideas to make the fog. Including using sprites, as well as textures rendered on geometry planes. I settled on adding back in the very simple atmospheric fog to kind of "wash" the scene. As-well as making use of the volume primitives again. This combined with a 3d texture makes for an acceptable fog effect, taking a cue from the Maya fluid effect, I am going to use an expression to control the timeslider that will animate the fog. This solution has provided both a reasonable aesthetic outcome aswell as a reasonable render time.
I tried to use the Maya fluid system to create a fog for the clouds, after a failed attempt trying to use sprites. However this method of creating the fog increases the render times to an unacceptable amount. However I an aware of another technique used by Alex Alvarez in several of his images (Including "Dirge" which was the basis for this project initially).
However here he explains his use for creating some background fog in his image "Gathering"
I hope to utilize the same technique as well as some expressions to get an animated fog that renders quickly.
Here we have the rain, with its size and lighting tweaked to closer match the reference, as-well as what the the rain would look like on a plain background, which could be used later for compositing. I want to try and find a better solution for the fog as-well, one that can be animated, however fog in the past is what has made the render times impractical, so hopefully I will find a good solution.
Here we have some more reference footage and images.As you can see it was raining incredibly heavily when I took these. There is some things that I noticed aswell, Im sure its more to do with the camera I was using but the streaks in these images are a lot shorter than the ones In my current renders. Secondly, the rain is illuminated a lot brighter than I currently have it, and so in order to match the real rain better, I will need to tweak the render settings and the lighting. Currently I amen't using any motion blur as it increases render times to an unacceptable degree, I'm using different anti-aliasing filters to blur the result of the image to get a better look for now though.
The first test render of the rain effect, I'm reasonably happy with how its falling at this stage, though it could benefit from falling faster. However looking at my reference, the lighting is off and I feel that the environment fog is too dark as-well and so the effect is not as visible as I would like.
After a failed attempt to get the scene rendering in vRay (its being funny about rendering nParticles), I rebuilt the scene from scratch in Maya 2014 (it was in 2015 previously). I also went out and shot an IBL to illuminate the scene and provide the rain something to refract. I managed to create the "streaking" effect by using instanced geometry over the particle system, I had previously tried to create the effect using motion blue, but the result was not as good and it increased the render times too much.
Currently the scene is also using Maya's simple fog environment shader to provide a bit of atmospheric perspective. I have here a play-blast of the effect as it is currently, as well as the IBL I used.
The way the rain is lit is going to be very important. Rain is hard to pick out a lot of the time because of its transparent nature, especially when situated against a grey sky. Although the size of the rain plays an important factor - its far easier to see bigger drops - the way its lit is still the most important factor in creating a good effect.
I've also been out gathering a bit of reference pertaining to the environment fog. Now, its been quite bright here today and so the fog is a lot lighter here than it will probably end up being in the scene itself. It still serves as good reference for me however.
I am also currently reworking the scene in order to render with V-Ray, this will hopefully lead to a further improvement in render times.
Spending a bit of time within the options in Maya, I found a more efficient way to create the rain effect. That is through the use of Motion blur. Using an nParticle system to generate the droplets, and using a Sphere as the particle geometry with an Mia material applied (With settings in place to match that of water).
The streak like effect comes from the Motion blur which is applied to the render.
Trying a more complex Bifrost simulation, mainly to see what my system can handle aswell as how to do some basic things like collisions with geometry. It is an impressive tool, and I want to see if it can be used to create rain, or if it can be used to enhance the rain effect in anyway. I'm thinking that it may be a good solution for creating the more "fog-like" aspects of a storm.
I've found a lot of references to After Effects being used to create rain in post for certain shorter films. A lot of the references I've found for larger budget films involve the use of a special effect, rather than a visual effect. Such as in the Noah post I made earlier.
I did however find a very interesting video a while back (I forgot to post it) on how they created some of the water effects in "Battleship". Its a very interesting video, and I feel that a lot of this could be applied to some rain effects. I have also been spending a bit of time in the new Bifrost system within Maya 2015, figuring out a little bit about the system. Within a few minutes I managed to put together this very basic simulation.
Taking this further, I would like to try and work something like this into my rain scene.
This effect is proving somewhat impractical to render. Mainly due to the heavy use of Refractions in the materials. I think that with some tweaks to the lighting, the actual effect will look allright though.
I have attempted to render it in realtime using a CGFX shader, but this did not work either.
I am going to try reducing the fog effect to see if that is an acceptable solution.
Oh, and I do want to try some water effects within Maya 2015's new Bifrost system.
So, while looking up some VFX videos I came across this one. Its got some advice in it that i shall be working into my setup. Such as back lighting the rain more. I will either crank up the sun or add in another light for such purposes.
Yet another render of the fog atmospherics. Playing about with silhouetting some geometry.
I would like to try and simulate a lightning strike as-well.
I really need to try and lessen the render times though, as rendering the volumetric fog as-well as layers of refractive material takes a long time.
In adding some more atmosphere to the scene I changed the way the fog works. Now there is another particle system consisting of sprites that have a fog texture/material applied to them, however there is also an environment fog pass shader in the scene to add just that bit more overall.
I also decided to add a strong light to simulate the sun shining through the fog, which lead to some really cool crepsecular (god ray) effects.
All passes rendered together.
The environment fog pass.
The ground model pass.
The rain pass (including IBL background for refractions)
A volumetric fog effect that I created. However it is inefficient as it takes far too long to render. I have a simpler solution to create this which should hopefully provide better and quicker results. At the moment its just particles with a volumetric shader applied.
I am going to switch it so the fog is an environment shader and the particles are sprites with a texture applied.
In creating the rain effect I used a scene I already had lying around that already had a water material within it. First off I set up the lighting for the scene using an IBL, I usually use IBL's as standard in scenes anyway, however, given the reflective/refractive nature of water It was important to have something in the scene that can provide reflections/refractions from every direction.
The scene I was using as a base just has a standard piece of "island" geometry surrounded by water.
The material being used for the water. The most important part is the Fresnel reflections/refractions and the IOR. As the IOR of water is 1.33, it is important that this matched to create as physically accurate a material as possible.
This is what the water material looks like when applied to droplets of water that I modelled.
A basic rain-type effect being emitted from the surface above, there is a gravity force acting on it aswell so that it falls realistically.
I experimented with instancing physical geometry to get the right look for the raindrops, however this proved impractical as the poly-count always made the simulation run very slow. The geometry I was using at this point did not look like rain either.
Using just points I was able to create a much better effect, aswell as making use of the "strand" system in ICE to create particle tails that mimic streaks of rain.
This is the node setup for the effect, the effect also has a "wind" force acting on it to create a bit of turbulence and to produce a more realistic effect.
This image just shows me experimenting with how to light the effect, in the end I tweaked the IBL to look more like a stormy overcast day, I also had a front light to mimic a weak sun shining through the clouds.
This is a very simple composite of a few things in Photoshop. The Raw render, a blurred version of that render and a blue-ish colour grade. I could achieve similar results in 3D with Motion blur and a grade added within the compositing software.
However before I do that I want to add the "misty" effect that you often see with heavy rain storms, I also want to change the wind so that it blow the rain more violently.
This stage is just me gathering a load of research and references for when trying to create the effect.
I found some useful information on the characteristics of the individual droplets, their shape and how they fall.
(From Wikipedia)
At sea level providing there is no wind.:
0.5 mm drizzle impacts at 2m/s
5 mm drops impact at 9m/s
As you can see the raindrops here are very different to how they usually look in photographs, their "tail" is a lot less apparent. I think this is partly due to the fact that during a rainstorm there would be very strong winds that would blow out the tail of a raindrop (very similar to how comets and solar winds work). Another factor I feel would be the cameras not quite being able to keep up with the speed and amount of rain falling, and creating a kind of "motion blur" effect.
Some reference images of rain taken from far away aswell as close up. Ideally I would like to shoot my own footage aswell but I shall need to wait for a rainy day to do that.
I found this video aswell which is a good reference for rain, however it does not look like there is much wind in this video.
Some beautiful reference for lightning (not sure I will do lightning as an effect, I want to focus on rain for now)
This is good reference for water as a material, as I will have to recreate the effect including materials.
The next step is to start building up a basic raindrop effect to start with.
Rain I feel is such a necessary effect to be able to reproduce, and as such it will be the first of the systems I will be trying to reproduce. I am going to look at how it is done within games and within VFX in an attempt to produce a dynamic solution that will work well for 3d artwork. I will be experimenting with creating the effect within both Maya and Softimage, with a look to have a render done using V-Ray (which I only own for Softimage so far).
Here is some example of the sort of effect I am trying to reproduce for this part of it.
These are parts of some characters I am modelling for another module. For the knight on the far left I used a Syflex Cloth simulation In order to get the fabric to drape better around the reference model I was using.
It was a useful technique I found to help bring a bit more realism to the character, and saved me a lot of time to the alternative (taking the model to ZBrush).
I will have a number of systems to create for my Computer Arts Practice module. So I will be studying how to make them the best I can within this module.
For a model I created last year, I was never happy with what I was able to accomplish with it, so I decided to try and create a small scene to place him in. The image below was created using dynamic to accomplish the shattering effect.
I created a polygonal cube and using the demo version of Exocortex Implosia FX proceeded to slice it into chunks. Then I ran a simulation in which the cube was shattered with a sphere, using the creature as collision meshes. This created the basic shatter effect I was looking for, but then I froze the simulation and used some more traditional modelling methods to improve the look of the effect.
This was essentially a "sketch" of a scene so I didn't spend a lot of time fine tuning it, but it does demonstrate the sort of things I'm trying to accomplish and how I'm using dynamics in my work currently.
For scripting and dynamics this year, I am very keen to study the aspects of this field that can enhance my 3d artwork. I have been doing some research and performing some preliminary tests and have found that there is many things that I can use dynamics for.
A fantastic example of what Im talking about is illustrated in this video.
Effects such as the instancing of the locusts or the atmospheric particles (I know for a fact the fire is composited stock footage) I believe could really enhance my work.
The hair and fur on the character aswell as the candles and the atmospheric fog in the background. Subtle effects like this I feel could really help enhance my work and help me learn more about dynamic systems.
Next step was to add the capsules muscles in places that made sense. I wasn't trying to be super accurate with them. I just wanted them to be roughly anatomically correct in a way that they would assists with the deformation and make it more believable.
