Hi to everyone,

I am trying to wrap up a test shot and have a slight issue. I'm not allowed to show you the shot, but it's simple enough to explain. It's basically a plain in flight, camera in front of the craft looking at the nose. Oh, and it's raining too. I have the rain behavior all set and I'm trying to render the scene. Problem is, the rain drops that are right on the camera line of view are very bright and don't get any blur. I expected that pretty much from the start and thought it would be simple enough to solve. Guess I was wrong.

I tried with alpha, but then all the drops get lower visibility. I also really have to watch render time on this. What would you suggest as a solution so the drops that move away from the camera in an almost straight line don't look so obviously like solid spheres? Thank you very much!!! If I can crack this with your help, the shot is done.

you could find the points that are along the camera view and delete them…
try a box(or some shape that does the job) as a child of the camera, use that to make a group and then delete that group…


HTH

i have thought about that solution as well, actually. the reason why i could not is because the camera is swooping around and ends up looking down at the plane (plane is facing left, so rain is going left -> right). if i did the delete thing, i'd end up with a spot of no rain. keeping the cube in place wont work either, the camera movement is too slow and for the first 150-200 frames i still get the ugly bright spheres.

thank you very much for the suggestion though!

Hmm how about doing the same group-by-parented-box -thing but instead of deleting, assign another material with low or 0 opacity? or scale down maybe?

eetu.

Using velocity blur on the particles couldn't solve the problem? I think what Arctor is refering to is to basically a frustum-based point culling. So that particles that are outside of the frustum get delete, and perhaps speed things up a little? Otherwise, you should be able to separate the rain into fore/mid/back-ground pass that may help combat combat render time issue associated with opacity?