A tornado to check out!

[smileypete]

anyone got any idea how to make the rain look a little more errr... rainy?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZHURYVYJVI

cheers peeps

[fracturedray]

A few things come to mind.

Take a look a some rain videos and photos to help. Here is a simple drop of water. http://www.pbase.com/ronnie_14187/image/36165836

As you can see the drop of water is an upside down reflection of the surroundings.

So you could simply render a single frame of the scene (without the rain)
If you have Photoshop or Gizmo.
Open the image, flip it upside down.
If you want you can distort the image with a bubble but it will be so small it is not really needed.
Make a circle selection and remove the outside part of the image. (I recommend after you do this that you scale the image to be 2 times narrower or 2 times taller, water drops to the naked eye look like they are long)
Add some specular highlights and shade on the outer edge if you want.
Save as a PNG so that the layer is not flattened (alpha remains).

Import the image into AS.
Add the Particle "Rain" (Scripts/Particle Effects/Rain)
Remove the vector layers in the folder and move the rain drop image in to the particle folder.
Scale down the drop as needed, duplicate the image layer and vary the size a bit for each one.
Press Play.

You may want to increase the speed and number of particles to get it just right.

[smileypete]

thanks for the tips, i tried exactly as you said, and it looks 100x better, sadly my computer is now groaning under the stress of having to render 500-1000 png images which is taking it about 50 times as long as a tiny little vector...

anyone know if you can set up a render node for anime studio? so i can send my renders to a separate CPU (workhorse computer) while i continue creating?

[fracturedray]

Yeah, my particle animations slowed down a lot because of that as well.

I don't know anything about how to make a slave computer for rendering but if you don't mind a little visible pattern you could make 3 or 4 large png images with randomly placed drops in them (maybe 20-40 drops each). And then replace them with the other water drops and bring down the particle number a good deal.

I'm not sure how large your original movie is but if it was about 1000 pixels wide then the large water drop textures could be about 512 x 512 and be fine.

[smileypete]

excellent thought, thinking outside the square, i like it.

my computers been trying to render 6 seconds of animation for around 7 hours now, its nearly finished.

its not a slow computer either (iMac Dual Core 2.4GHz)

cmooooooon!