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 Whew! 13th time's the charm!  Finally got this recorded, haha

So huge thanks to Cassie Jones for showing me that you can independently offset the timing of video textures- I have a new optimized blend file ready for download, and a new little explanatory video.

Blender doesn't let you pack video files (which I just found out), and I wasn't able to get relative paths to work- but it's super easy to link them up. Just go File, External Data, Find Missing Files, and navigate to the folder with the textures. BAM! Fixed! Way easier than linking them all back up by hand.

You can download the video textures on their own, or a project file with everything in it
Right here

Files

Rain Textures for Blender

Comments

Anonymous

nicely done.thanks Ian

Anonymous

Haha i jus did my weekly "bodyclock reset stay up until a normal time" deal too, feels good to be on the right side of the day. Great stuff as always mang.

Anonymous

Ian, you are the man. Loving your Patreon and the pace that you are adding content, it's so invaluable to my learning and such an inspiration to what can be done with Blender. Keep up the good work.

Anonymous

Man that's great. Thanks for sharing!

Anonymous

Great technique, and you created some nice footage to use. But in terms of performance, does this slow things down more than using a particle system? Or do you have an insanely powerful rig to work on so you don't have to compromise? It's just occurred to me that you could also generate normal bumps for your rain footage which might look cool...

Anonymous

Thanks Ian!

Anonymous

Very clever and very useful Ian! If I may, a small tutorial about the atmospheric lighting we see in your work would be so interesting!

Anonymous

Really nice job! Thanks for taking the time to photograph and tweak the graphics-- that's the hardest part! Curious, why did you change the mapping mode to Smart?

Jan van den Hemel

Thanks for you hard work and for the wonderful assets Ian!

IanHubert

Ah! You're welcome! And yeah- when I backed the camera up and the rain got further away, it started to interpolate the texture, and I actually saw a row of pixels from the bottom wrap around to the top, meaning there was this hovering row of pixels on the top of the plane. You could just fix it by tweaking the UV mapping, but also changing the interpolation to smart fixed that- that said, I don't know much about it (I unfortunately can't find who, but somebody only introduced me to other types of interpolation a couple days ago)- is "Smart" a lot more processor intensive?

IanHubert

EXCEPT THAT I ALWAYS FORGET that my body wants to sleep more the next night, so unless I set an alarm and push through, it's never as easy as I hope. That said, I'm seeing two more hours of daylight today than yesterday, and I'm enjoying it!!

IanHubert

That's exactly the perfect question, yeah! And that's why I've probably come up with like 7 different ways to simulate rain, because it's all about the trade offs. For example, I could double the amount of visible drops on the "Falling rain" texture, then you'd only need half as many layers, but then you'd also have less volumetric rainfall- although in this case that might make sense. Using particle rain in cycles is tricky, because if you want to render it with motion blur, you really gotta crank the samples (although setting the drops to "emit" instead of using a more glassy-type shader helps a ton (or modeled "longer" drops instead of just little spheres)- and eevee doesn't support motion blur, so yeah lots of times you have to actually model the blur into the droplet. I did an experiment last week where instead of having all the rain/droplets actually animated, I'd have them just appear in a random volume (for the drops), or across the surface (for the splashes) for a single frame- and it actually worked alright! https://youtu.be/H9E3dFjY1kc But ooo- yeah it'd be fun to experiment with normal maps! right now there isn't anything glossy going on- but there could be! I'm going to play with that!

Anonymous

Ian, from the documentation it appears Smart is only valid for Cycles: "Smart (Cycles Only) Only for Open Shading Language. Use cubic interpolation when scaling up and linear when scaling down, for a better performance and sharpness." It appears it's like "automatic" interpolation mode in Photoshop, where it use bicubic when upscaling (simplified:adding a bit of blur) and bilinear when reducing (simplified: adding sharpening). It makes sense not adding this overhead to EEVEE, whether it's not hardwired in GPU nor explicitly computed real time. At least that's my thoughts.

Anonymous

Darn, wish Patreon would allow edits.

Anonymous

It does! Expand the little dots next to the "reply" and "like" buttons on your comment

Anonymous

Those aren't there on the mobile app-- but they are there if you use Patreon in phone web browser. Thanks for the suggestion!

IanHubert

Oh interesting! It DID appear to fix the issue I was having in eevee, though?? Maybe it's a case of seeing what I expected to see. I appreciate your thoughts!! Regardless, I think I'll just add a row of black pixels around my video textures now, so it won't be so easy for stuff to bleed/wrap around to the top. (Also- just did a test in blender- it DEFINITELY fixed the wraparound problem in eevee... maybe the documentation's out of date?? Or maybe whichever interpolation it defaults to when it can't use Smart works better than linear.)

IanHubert

AH! I do hope it's useful! And yeah! Usually I don't mess with volumetrics tooooo much- although in this case I actually lowered the contrast of the falling rain layer, till the whole thing was only juuuuuust barely visible, and all the layers together actually formed a sort of volumetric fog, which was cool :D. I think there's a tiny bit of it visible in the video.

Anonymous

Smart interpolation definitely does *something* in Eevee. I had a lot of problems with the filtering making textures look blurry from low angles, and I discovered that the Smart interpolation almost always fixes that

IanHubert

Stefan! Were you the person who introduced me to it the other day? I wanted to thank you in the video, but couldn't find where you'd said it!

Anonymous

Ah, yes! I deleted the comment because when I tried it on the video footage you provided, it didn't seem to do a whole lot, and I didn't want to mislead people 😅 I have no idea how or why it works, but it just seems to somehow

Anonymous

Can I just note that Ian is by far the most active patreon creator I know and he also gives away SUCH GOOD STUFF (both assets and knowledge). Just felt like saying "thank you"..

Anonymous

love the easy solution. I tried weight painting to get splashes and wrapped my head around a pole. so this works so much better!

Anonymous

cool, how do you connect those two shaders into a mix shader looked like select both and some hotkey? found it - ctrl zero ..gonna read all of node wrangler help now

Anonymous

NiCe WoRk GenTilEmEn... VERY NiCe WOrk ...!!

Anonymous

Dear Ian, I am a newbie to blender and you have been the person who pushed me into the Blender world. Have to thank you for always sharing good things to the community. I just have one silly question, I tried to add the rain planes into my own personal small work, and after some amounts of planes (like 10 or above), it started to darken the background and casting shadows. It might be some really easy question, but i have googled it a bit and can't seem to find solution. So thank you for taking your time reading this, or maybe answering this! And thank you again for making me finding my new hobbit and passion!

IanHubert

Oh hello!!! Thanks so much for being here! :D Can I ask if you're using eevee or cycles? There are reasons both of them could make the scene darker (and I think I've actually learned some better ways to set up this stuff up since I made the video a year ago).

Anonymous

Sorry for not mentioning it, I used Cycles! Would love to know the reason behind it. And I am eally really appreciate for the reply! Thank you so much.

Anonymous

Hey! I am not sure if you found an answer but, (while in cycles) go down to the material properties of the rain plane, then scroll down until you see viewport display, then change the shadow mode to none... if this doesn't solve your problem, try going to the object properties tab, scroll down until you see "shading" then in visibility, un check shadows.. (keep in mind the plane has to be highlighted in the viewport for any of these options to show up)

Anonymous

For me setting the max transparance bounces under the light path tab solved weird issues.