Matrix Digital Rain Effect
In this tutorial we are going to create the so famous digital rain effect of The Matrix movie trilogy. As a big fan of the movie, I tried so hard to achieve original looking effect. And after trying many different ways I finally succeeded using a ‘Particle Flow’. It’s a little bit complex, but if you follow this tutorial correctly you will get a good result.
Arranging the scene
1. First create a plane on the front viewport with following parameters.
Length : 10, Width: 300, Length Segs : 1, Width Segs : 60
2. Create a PF Source [Particle Systems > PF Source ].
3. Now create a Target Camera facing the plane
4. Set the Time Line’s length to 200.
PF Source
1. Press ‘6’ key on the keyboard to open the ‘Particle View’ window.
2. This is [Fig 02] what you see in the Particle View window. If you have never used Particle View before, do not afraid. Just note the panels on this image.
3. In the ‘Event 01’ event, select the ‘Position Icon 01’ and press delete key to delete the operator.
3. In the depot, find the ‘Position Object’ operator and drag it to the ‘Event 01’.
4. Select the ‘Position Object 01’ operator. In the parameter panel, ‘Emitter Objects’ group, click add button and select ‘Plan01’. On the Location group select ‘Selected Vertices’ from the dropdown list.
Now the particles are emitting from the Plane’s vertices.
5. Select ‘Birth 01’ operator and set the following values.
Emit Start : 0, Emit Stop : 100, Rate : 50
6. Add a ‘Delete’ operator to the Event 01 and set the following values.
By Particle Age : turn on, Life Span : 60, Variation :10
7. Select ‘Speed 01’ operator and set Speed value to 100 and Variation to 30.
8. Drag a ‘Shape Facing’ operator and drop it on the ‘Shape 01’ operator, so ‘Shape 01’ will be replaced by ‘Shape Facing 01’. Select ‘Camera 01’ as ‘Look at Camera\Object’. Change the ‘In World Space’ unit value to 4.
9. Click on the color circle on the ‘Display 01’ operator and change the color to a light green.
Now the Particle View should appear as this:
These are the leading particles and now we have to add trail particles…..
Please follow the part:2 of the tutorial to continue..
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Tags: 3d max, degital rain, matrix, tutorial
Awesome tutorial.. Is it possible for you to explain how you made the title “Matrix Digital Rain”
Thanks
In the tutorial, the digital rain is on a 2d layer. But for that intro image I used few layers arranged in 3d space and each has a gap between them. So it has a sense of depth.
You can easily do this by cloning the plane’s polygon to elements. But you will have to increase the birth rate.
And then it is Photoshop and a matching font.
hello, I find quite interesting this lesson, and I want to go on it till the end, but I stuck at the beginning of the lesson to step 4 ‘Set the Time Line’s length to 200 “can not find this option, help me please to pass it over
(I apologize for the inconveniences, but i`m beginner, never played with camera before)
You can find it here in the picture,
http://www.3dknot.com/files/images/2010/07/time.jpg
Hope u can continue the tutorial…
hi, ive tried your tutorial and did everything but when i go to render a shot of the scene all im rendering are cloured squares. none of my characters are showing up like yours have.
In the material editor can u see the images in slots?
Check weather the Material Operators are added..
Try changing the diffuse colors of each material and check weather those color appear in the render..
Aguardando a continuação do tutorial.
Obrigado.
This is a very nice tutorial, but I had a problem, when I render the final image with glow, it show this message (“bitmap expected unsupported GBuffer channel transparency”/ “Lens Effects” effect expected unsupported GBuffer channel transparency”) did I something wrong?
thank’s a lot
Dah.. Know the case. You get this because you are rendering with Mental Ray renderer. You should render this with Scanline renderer.
Render Scene (F10)> Common > Assign Renderer > change to Scanline renderer.
Hi, I have been following your current blog for handful of weeks and I locate it fascinating. How do I subscribe it?
Subscribe to the RSS feed.
A good book on your shelf is a friend that turns its back on you and remains a friend. ~Author Unknown
hey man can i do the same but with animation??i mean..i want it to look like in the real matrix – with animation
You can do camera animation like in the opening sequence of Matrix. To get the depth of the rain, use multiple layers (see my 1st comment).
thanks! really goog tutorial. keep up the good work
ty so much , very nice tutorial
all of ur tutorials are so coool . ty so much
I did this tutorial step by step and found it very helpful for learning particle systems along with a few new tricks. However I was having some difficulties at the end with getting the letters to have the particle age in the self illumination map. They would not perform the action, one trick i found was to apply the particle age map to the diffuse map and then set the color on the letters down for each amount. It worked out very well for the end result.
Another problem I had was the glow, it did not want to apply correctly no matter what I did. I even redid the tutorial to make sure I was doing it correctly. A few more screen shots of your materials would have made this tutorial better. along with what version of 3ds max you are using.
I am currently using 2012 and some things might have changed so I’m not surprised if they did.
Thanks again for the tutorial it was very helpful.
How do you set the timeline to 200?
how do i get it