After Effects: Practice for raining animation

This is a note when I tried to make a rain scene. I'm not very familiar with Adobe After Effects, so some steps can be inefficient or incorrect, so please keep in mind about there might be better way when you read this post.

The example of the animation I made on this post is next one.

The background of this animation is from this page.

There are a few effects to make the rain scene more realistic:

  • For rain drops on a window, use CC. Mr Mercury, Fractral Noise, and Displament Map
  • For raining, use CC. Rainfall
  • For a fogged window, use Camera Lens Blur
  • For text on a fogged window, use Overlay blending mode

Details of each effect

Rain drops on a window

I watched next video to learn how to show rain drops, but I removed some steps that I couldn't see significant differences.

Here are the each step for how to do:

  1. To add an effect for rain drops which is transparent to the background
    1. Duplicate a background layer you wanna show through a window
    2. Add a Simulation > Cc Mr. Mercury effect to the layer
  2. To make rain drops more realistic, update values of CC Mercury Control Effects
    1. To show the rain drops on wide area
      1. Change Radius X and Radius Y
    2. To change the size of each drop
      1. Change Blob Birth Size and Blob Death Size
    3. To change how many drops show and how long each drop should show
      1. Change Birth Rate
      2. Change Longevity (sec)
    4. To change how fast drops move
      1. Change Velocity. It seems this relates with horizontal moves especially when Gravity value is very low.
      2. Change Gravity
    5. To combine some rain drops randomly, especially for big rain drops
      1. Add new solid layer on the bottom of a composition and add Noise & Gain > Fractal Noise effect to the layer
      2. Add Distort > Displament Map effect to the rain drop layer
      3. Change Displament Map Layer to the layer you added Factal Noise

In the animation, I set following values of the effect. The composition size of the animation is 1920 x 1080.

  1. For small rain drops sticking with the window
    • Radius X: 320
    • Radius Y: 320
    • Velocity: 0
    • Birth Rate: 80
    • Longevity: 20
    • Gravity: 0.0001
    • Blob Birth Size: 0.02
    • Blob Death Size: 0.02
  2. For big rain drops falling down on the window shortly
    • Radius X: 320
    • Radius Y: 320
    • Velocity: 0.01
    • Birth Rate: 0.5
    • Longevity: 100
    • Gravity: 0.01
    • Blob Birth Size: 0.15
    • Blob Death Size: 0.2
    • Added Displament Map effect

I also watched next video to understand about Displament Map and Fracteral Noise, so it might be worth watching if you are not familiar with it.

Raining

For Raining animation, I watched next video and learned Cc Rainfall effect can be used.

These are steps to add this effect:

  1. Add an Adjustment layer and add Simulation > Cc Rainfall effect to the layer
  2. To make raining better, update CC Rainfall values
    1. If rain is strong, then
      1. Change Drops to show bigger number of rains
      2. Change Size to show each rain makes it clear
      3. Change Speed
    2. If it's windy day, then to make rains fall diagonally,
      • Change Wind and/or Spread value to bigger

In my video, the values of these are:

  • Drops: 1000
  • Size: 3.0
  • Speed: 4000
  • Wind: 0
  • Spread: 6

Fogged window

I learned the idea of fogged window is from next video. In next video, there are many explanations not only fogged window, but also rain drops and how to make them more realistic.

To show a fogged window in AE, making our background blurred is one way. I used Camera Lens Blur for my animation, but there are other types of blue so with them you can highly likely do similar things.

  1. Add Blur & Sharpen > Camera Lens Blur to the background layer
  2. Change Camera Lens Blur values
    1. Change Blur Radius to show how strong the window is fogged

Text on a foggy window

I couldn't find any information on how to show rain texts on a foggy window for AE, but there was a video for Photoshop and it can be used in AE too. Next video is the one to explain how to show rain text on a foggy window with Photoshop.

In AE, we can add rain texts similarily and quite easily by:

  1. Add a text layer and write texts
  2. Change the mode from Normal to Overlay on the text layer
  3. Change the text color to black.
    • The color depends on the blightness of background, but black usually works unless the background is dark

Further improvements

Melting text

For the words on the window in a rainy day, it's not always clear and usually looked like "melting", or being erased gradually. I couldn't find how to do very well and easily.

More realistic rain drops

In this post, I described to animate rain drops using Mr Mercurity. But instead, there is a sophisticated way to show more reliastic rain drops explained in the next video.

I didn't choose this way because it was too complicated and Mr Mercury was simple and sufficient for me, but if you do not satify with it, the way explained in this video may be helpful.