Planetside Software Forums

General => Terragen Discussion => Topic started by: N-drju on June 10, 2021, 09:09:02 AM

Title: Need suggestions on making rain
Post by: N-drju on June 10, 2021, 09:09:02 AM
Hello everyone,

I'd like to ask how would you approach a task of making rain in Terragen scene?


I think this should be something hi-res. The thing is, it should "glow" in the headlights as I'm dealing with a rainy night. A stretched cloud layer will not suffice this time.

Is making raindrop object the only solution here? Perhaps you have other ideas.
Title: Re: Need suggestions on making rain
Post by: Dune on June 10, 2021, 10:03:44 AM
You might have to search the forum, as Hannes once did very nice rain, and I think uploaded some stuff.
A population of tiny stretched stones on a vertical invisible card/sheet might work. Or a few of those cards behind eachother.
Why wouldn't cloud work? Very low quality, thin, small size, and glow checked? Did you experiment with that?
Title: Re: Need suggestions on making rain
Post by: SILENCER on June 10, 2021, 03:27:11 PM
Do it in After Effects, save the aggravation
Title: Re: Need suggestions on making rain
Post by: WAS on June 10, 2021, 04:21:17 PM
I agree. Just use a V2 for the rain haze at distances, and then use after effects or other post to add close rain to camera. As doing this, with even v2 clouds, will be super slow.

Terragen Particle system ftw @Matt
Title: Re: Need suggestions on making rain
Post by: KlausK on June 13, 2021, 03:56:38 AM
Or if it needs to be 3D geometry perhaps build something streaky in Blender or particles converted to geo and import obj as population.
Then you can texture in TG.
CHeers, Klaus
Title: Re: Need suggestions on making rain
Post by: WAS on June 16, 2021, 03:01:48 PM
Additionally, you may be able to do a projection on a card. May try something.
Title: Re: Need suggestions on making rain
Post by: WAS on June 16, 2021, 05:07:20 PM
Yeah works pretty decently. I used a quick streak mask I made in Photoshop to input to opacity of default, then input default to main input of a surface layer with a glass shader, added a little displacement, and then masked the surface shader by opacity image.

Could just make the rain with voronoi too and have it be procedural and more random. Or maybe not, apparently voronoi spheres that small can't be stretched on Y past a certain point. Additionally, when it's on Final Position, the streaks become black, and are no longer glass water streaks. Too bad. Weird bug between a image and scalar.
Title: Re: Need suggestions on making rain
Post by: Dune on June 17, 2021, 01:28:05 AM
Nicely done. Perhaps you wouldn't need voronoi, but perlin would do just as well. Individual drops are hardly distinguishable anyway.
Title: Re: Need suggestions on making rain
Post by: WAS on June 17, 2021, 01:41:54 AM
I setup a small scene to see how it looks against haze, and as I suspected, there were ray issues or something, and the sampler goes a bit nuts trying to maintain the haze consistently between frames. The encoding is as lossless, and I stepped the TIF images to be sure it wasn't encoding.



Of course youtube encoding seems to have ruined the upload and can't even see the rain really. Here is a download: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vAS0KW0Bem0X9c-Qm-8kDdX-NYIrWZXS/view?usp=sharing

And I have attached the example project with the simple mask here: https://planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,29316.new.html#new