Rainfall System - Particle Flow Tutorial

This tutorial will show you how to use Particle Flow to get raindrops to act like real water as it splashes, drips, and drops all over.

[@michalcapek7281]

Thanks! great tutorial

[@imagemfinal]

Great tutorial Clint! a question, how this system will work in a scene with some complexity? i will try to aplly your workflow in a shot that i am doing, is a camera moving a little showing a road, will have many people walking and buildings.

[@nalunui]

As with anything in the particle effects world it will mostly depend on what kind of computer you have. Static objects will always work easier, and fewer objects will work easier. Also things like the blobmesh that comes with stand alone 3DS Max tends to be very slow, if you are truly planning on doing a lot with meta-ball type substances I'd recommend Frost from Thinkbox, which works a bit more smoothly and a lot faster.
If you can break the shot into smaller chunks and edit them together to make it appear as though many people are walking the same road, when in reality each cut has only 1 or 2, that would also help speed things up. If you plan on doing some intense liquid simulations you may want to take a look at a program like Real Flow. I say, try it and find out if you are unsure how well your computer will handle a scene with more complexity =)

[@imagemfinal]

Thanks Clint! i will try to create a dummy scene that will have only the main areas that will receive the water drops to reduce the calculation.

[@nalunui]

Also think about Proxy objects ... for instance an un-renderable object around the head and shoulders of a character containing less polygons for the drops to splash off of rather than using the entire mesh of a character. =)

[@GeraldMcGinley]

Hey Clint, my rain just stops emitting after about 80 frames. Any ideas?