Rain

[Hannes]

There are several images in this forum before the rain and some after the rain, but very few during the rain. Maybe from a distance with beautiful rain curtains below the clouds.

I wanted to have a scene with the typical light when the sky is completely overcast. I could probably have used a dense cloud layer, but I had another idea: I created a huge plane above the whole scene and assigned a white selfilluminating (2.5) material to it.
So there is absolutely no lightsource in the scene except this plane and of course the environment light that makes the white light bounce. I used GISD with a very high (3) ambient occlusion.
The rain is a localised cloud layer with a very small vertically stretched noise which is slightly rotated by a transform shader (thanks to Ulco for this obvious solution!!!).

[Dune]

Terrific!! I love this. Good idea about the big plane. I used localised illuminated planes sometimes for lighting certain areas in front (before the spotlight), but this is a very impressive use.

[Volker Harun]

Very cool image ... I like the lighting and shading very much. (<-- !!!!!!!!)

MoodFlow used an inverted sphere instead of a plane ... maybe slower than your approach.

[mhaze]

This is great, very moody and dank.  May I suggest some water droplets on some of the plants.

[Hannes]

May I suggest some water droplets on some of the plants.

You may. Look closer...

[DocCharly65]

Oh wow! I had somthing like that in my wishlist since more than a year! Great, Hannes.

Ähem... looking closer was not a soooo goood suggestion... I found something: Is that a root or a branch with angular shapes?

But anyway terrific!

Could it work to add an invisible plane with some droplets on it to make it look like droplets on the camera lense?

[inkydigit]

Excellent scene, and proof of concept!
Like a giant soft box.... Just like a real overcast sky!
I am going to have to try his!
Cheers Hannes!
Jason

[Hannes]

Thanks guys!
Nils, I know the branches are somehow squarish. I built this thing out of an existing tree, so I had to take what I could get. Bothers me too!!

That droplets-on-the-lens-thing sounds cool. Gonna think about that...

[AP]

The effect looks fairly convincing and refreshingly wet. Good job on the cleaver trickery used.

[Hannes]

Btw, I know that the droplets on the plants are far away from perfect. Since there is no way to create populations on populations, I just created a pop of spheres with a glass shader assigned to them and made them hover above the ground. The grass is very dense, so it's (hopefully) not too obvious that they aren't attached to anything.

[Hannes]

Just for fun some quick and dirty photoshopping...

[Tangled-Universe]

Cool work Hannes

I like the way you created the lighting setup.
My first choice would also be to use a cloud layer and use the depth or density to control how much of the shadow are visible.
This works nice too

For the droplets on the lens you could try positioning a tiny plane just before the camera (up to 10cm or so?) and place your transparent droplet texture on that.
Then enabling the DoF in the renderer you can create more correct results for this.

It remains to be seen how well visible it is, because unlike many people think, stuff on the front lens isn't causing troubles as often as one thinks.
The last element before the sensor/film, that one needs to be stupendously clean.
So if you'd ever buy a second-hand camera/lens and there's a tiny scratch on the front lens then say "I pay x euro less because of the scratch" while in real life the scratch barely causes visible isssues

Anyway, it's perhaps a nice idea to play with if you like and if you don't mind the added rendertime.

Cheers,
Martin

[AP]

The droplets do look like they are attached to the vegetation. It looks to be convincing enough.

[Hannes]

Good to hear, Chris. Thanks

Yes, Martin, some sort of reusable versatile droplet plane would be great!
There are some reference images in the web, but most of them are focused on the droplets, and the background is blurry. I'll have another look, and maybe I can create some real geometry to get also some refraction inside the droplets.

And maybe this is just render overkill crap... 

I'll try anyway.

[AP]

No problem.