Hey everyone!
This week, we’ll be showing you a technique we use to render small drops of water that run down the face of our characters. You’ll see it’s quite simple, and also has the benefit of being far less complicated than to try to simulate the whole thing.
First, we create an animated texture of the droplets. In order to do this, we use After Effects and a texture of the character’s face as reference. This way, it’s a lot easier to animate the drops so that they really follow the contours of the face.
Once the animation is completed, we export an image sequence with only the drops in black and white so that we can later apply it on the 3d model.
For example, here’s one close-up shot that needed this effect :
We create a new pass with a constant material that uses the image sequence that we rendered previously. This way, the texture will follow the model perfectly, no matter how much the face deforms.
That’s it! Now, we only need to render the pass to use it in our compositing package. A good general tip to really sell the effect is to make the drops be more visible in the reflective areas of the face. Here’s the final image :
Have a good week everyone!
