Nature of Rain and Snow in Animations
The basics of Rain and Snow
- Snow/Rain are a bit harder. You need to start off with an original and end with an original image in order for it to loop properly. BUT Rain and Snow are not equal, there are different sizes of rain and different sizes of snow, you have to be able to make it before hand in a large canvas *larger than the one being animated*, and then loop it without it looking cut off. This is the difficulty. If you can make it rain or snow, you are pretty much prepared for everything.
- The basics of Rain and Snow are these: a background, movement of different sized images, opacity, effects, and the ultimate hard thing: LOOP (of course after much headache I found a simple way to solve this problem :).
Some Tips to Note
- Rain and Snow are a bit harder than all animations, and I use many different ways to do them. But if I had to tell you one thing to remember it's this: the Loop. I have seen SO many people animating rain and snow, and it snows just fine, and suddenly akwardly it loops. To make it loop properly is what is the hard part, even I have to practice a lot >.> (but hopefully I found an easy method to do it :)
Rain: Kenshin OVA
First of all, this is straight off of my layout, so what I did was open the layout and the I put a line to help me figure out the frame size. That line determined where I would cut. This way I would have the same frame size, so that everything would work right (I selected where I would cut each time to display):
Now I create a set (or layer) called "Rain" and what I did was take the line tool and draw lines downwards, then using shapes BLUR, and several brushes, I erased around it to look like this:
Now, instead of painstakingly falling rain all the time, I opened a new canvas, COPYING the new rain layer in it. And made it LARGE in height and enough in width, dumping black in a new layer and pasting it behind it. To give a slight idea of this layout I made it 1500 pixels in height and 550 pixels width. I kept drawing rain in the original rain layer above it, so it's a 1500 pixel height layer full of rain =). This is a screenshot of that canvas:
Now, I paste this layer on the original Rain layer (it should create a new layer when you do this -- let's called the pasted layer "Rain 2" and the original "Rain 1") and align it with Rain 1, it should brighter a bit when you do this:
When it's aligned. Take the eye off of Rain 1, so it goes back the original image, seen two screens above. this one. Now this is the fun and simple part, just move your rain (since it's 1500 pixels in height technically) side to side downwards, selecting the area (using the white line and corners as a grid to make the frame size the same), merging visible (Layers >> Merge Visible). Like shown here:
Now, you might be asking: "It can't be that easy" it isn't as easy as it sounds. You need to move rain a little bit at a time, in order to merge the layers and save the image til you get to the end. It can't be too fast or too slow, and since it keeps continueing from the top, you have to keep covering enough so that it will fall. The hard part for ME was the loop. Just for a minute think how you would loop this thing? The rain has to end up at the beginning, but how can different rain end up at the beginning, because the drops in the beginning have to be the same, or else it will look like some rain was appearing/disappearing out of nowhere at the loop-- making it seem like blinking.
So you might be asking, okay, how do you loop rain, it's actually simple, and you can do with duplicating the layer. Remember Rain 1? The layer original that you took the eye off of? Now Duplicate it again. When you get close to the ending, move the duplicated Rain 1 (lets call that Rain 3) towards the top, and make it fall along with the ending of Rain 2 (the big canvas rain) and as you make it fall slowly, make sure to take the eye off/on with rain 1 to see where the rain 3 has to end up eventually. So duplicate the layers first:
The thing is, Rain 2 has to fall faster than Rain 3, because Rain 2 has to be ALMOST off the canvas before Rain 3 reaches the original (since that's the beginning of the loop), or else rain will suddenly disappear:
Although you might not see it in that 2 frame mistake, the rain is literally Super-Saiyan Transporting from one area to the other, that not only will clash with the perfect fall of Rain 2, but look really scrappy. So, we have to make sure that Rain 2 leaves the canvas and Rain 3 comes in to take it's place since Rain 3 is the same size and would fit the best. See the difference from the top and bottom (this one I didn't loop-- so refresh if you couldn't see it, or click here in a new window and refresh to see the difference.
As you can see above, this Rain isn't super-saiyan transporting :). So it's ready for the loop (this includes actually the last frame of the animation and the first frame of the loop). In the last 2 frames I brought in Rain 3 a little to the left of original Rain 1, and Rain 2 was near the bottom when I ended the last frame. Hence, when it repeated, Rain 1 appeared to the right of the absolute duplicate Rain 2, and Rain 2 seemingly disappeared to the bottom. The ending animation was this:
That was my first Rain animation, but I think perhaps if I could I would probably redo it with Rain actually dripping down the figures :).
Snow
Snow is very similar to Rain, the exact same steps, a bit more blur, round balls instead (making it a bit easier than long lines :P) You can also use snowflakes. I won't really go into snow, since it's exactly the same thing, just using balls (Rain is harder >.>) here is a Snow button I made once (though the loop is messed up at the end) -- This is a good example of a loop problem:
