Snow, Rain, Sun - I Need Help

[bjtin]

Hello,

I am new at Maya, and I have been desperately looking for good tutorials for making snow, rain, and a sunny sky where we can actually see a big, bright, shinning sun. Also, there is going to be a dome in the scene, so the snow would have to stay/accumulate on top of it with a few snowflakes sliding down. As for the rain, it would probably slide down and/or bounce (I will make 3 separate scenes with the dome, with 3 different kinds of weather - he oens mentioned above).

If somebody could help me asap, I would really appreciate it!

[demno]

For the sun, search the help for optical effects (OpticalFX), that will show you how to get it done. It will show you how to make the lightsource visible and it also contains halos, lensflares and such.

The Rain and snow you can do in the same way. I guess you are using particles. If so just select the particle object, then the dome and go Particles-> Make Collide. That makes them collide and gives the dome a node called GeoConnector. You can acces this in the attribute editor. In it you can adjust the Resiliance and Friction. In this case the resiliance will act as bounciness and the friction will control how the particles slide. To tune the simulation even more you can select the paticle object and in the channel box adjust, dynamic friction, static friction and bounciness to get the result you are looking for.

[bjtin]

Thank you, Demno! That was very helpful!

[bjtin]

Actually, I have another question: can we make snow and rain using the bubble, cloud, or tube particle render types? If yes, how? Thanks again!

[demno]

Sure you can! I guess you don't want to hardwarerender . But sure, use blobby surfaces without any threshold and it will work like points. (Kinda) Make them white and voila, snow

For rain you can use the sam technique. Just use the paticle collision event (or what it's called, it's in the particles menu. Just go in and set the events to every colision, emit particles, #5, random number of particles and the original particle dies. This will create a splash when the particle hit. Now you just tune this new particle object (find it in the outliner) set it to be the same as the original rain particles but give it a short random lifespan and gravity.

Then you just add a nice water shader to the particles and you are done. It's loads of tutorials for that on the net. If you render with mental Ray I believe you can even have motionblur on the particles so it will look even better.

Good Luck!

[bjtin]

Thank you again, Demno! I will try that!

[bjtin]

Ok... I am kind of stuck on the water shader... I told you I am SOOOO new at Maya!

How can I apply the water shader to the rain? Sorry I am ignorant on this!

Thanks!

[user_deleted]

don't bother with any ocean or liquid shaders for your rain all you need to do is create and apply a nice light, transparent phong with other properties like spec size to suit. render with raytracing obviously!

[demno]

How To get a nice Water/glass shader using a phong/anisotropic:

Glass/Water Shader by Pradeep Mamgain

Don't mind the glass modelling or lighting, just look at the shader and how it's built.

When the shader network is done you go into the attributes of your particleshape. There you set the particle render type to blobby surface, decide a radius and probably set the threshold to 0.

Now, select the particle object and rightclick on it, if yould the button in you get a menu, keep holding the button and navigate down to "assign existing material" in that menu, choose your nice phong and BAM!!!! you have water particles.

Use mental ray and put on some motion blur when rendering and it will look sweet Good Luck!

[bjtin]

Hi Demno,

Thank you again. My only problem is that I can't get mental ray to work for some reason. Actually, I am not sure how to load it, so I am trying to use software render. I wonder if that would work too.

[rowan-e]

Particles in Mental Ray is 2008 only isn't it?