How to make rainy atmosphere and mist?


Hi! i’ll go straight to the point: I have no idea of how to make my image look rainy and foggy/misty.
I’ve been looking around on millions upon millions of tutorials on how to make mist, but literally all of them suggest i use compositing which isn’t even possible with this polygon-heavy scene…(or am i using compositing wrong? i thought it had to be done post-render).

And even besides that the tutorials dont help me much even on simple scenes as i seem to get completely different results than those on Youtube.

As for the rainy part; i want to make the scene wet looking. I can make rain outside but what about the inside? How do i make, say the wall, wet. Is there any other elements missing for the scene to look wet?

Any help appreciated!

Check out volumetric lighting or volumetric fog for starters. There are probably many ways of going about creating mist/rain particles. Maybe particles?

Also, wet = glossy from a visual perspective. add a glossy shader onto all the objects in your scene. Since you are going for a post-apocalyptic vibe, I’d recommend adding more grime, especially near the window to show some sense of water getting into the building. The brand new washing machine is throwing me too, maybe grunge that up a lot!

I would consider compositing in the mist, and that you lower the hue-and-saturation of the image behind the mist.

If the light is supposed to be filtering through the mist, may also need to use a Curves node to tone-down the shape of that brightness curve. The difference between lit and dark is also much reduced.

The same technique can also be used for things like “I’m looking at this through a window pane.” Whatever’s supposed to be behind that window will have less H&S. (This, and the presence of something that creates a low-alpha reflection, is basically what tells your eye that there’s a window there.)

This concept is similar to the old movie trick of “night by day.”

What do you mean by particles? Particle system?
Preferably something that doesn’t completely crash the scene since it’s allready doing that by its own cause its so poly-heavy.

Can you reccomend any good compositing tutorial? Feels like literally all of them shows compositing when image is allready rendered. How does it even work?

The main thing for a “rainy foggy” feel is muted lighting. You want all the light sources soft and diffuse. Right now there are several bright patches where there is direct light shining… from somewhere? Do you have random spot lights floating in the scene? There should not be bright direct light shining in the window either. All diffuse, all the time.
As far as fog goes, yes, you should do it post-render in the compositor. If you want to use a different software, render out a z-pass, which you can then throw into Photoshop or the Gimp or whatever to apply a fog layer. Really, though, unless someone was actively taking a shower in there, the humidity wouldn’t be high enough to notice inside a building.

Wetness can get complex. It’s not only “add glossy”, but somehow mixing a dry material with a wet material. The wet will be darker and more saturated in the diffuse (depending on porosity and other factors, need to eyeball it). In addition they will share normal information until the wetness is so saturated the bumps will get reduced. Fully saturated (“water surface”) it will have no original normal left, but may even react on its own to other normal disturbances (wind, waves etc) although not applicable here. Since water have IOR 1.33, you may also want to modulate the fresnel of the water as it turns from semi saturated to fully saturated. Then you also need to mix this resulting mix with the original again using a mask (valleys and inwards bumps get saturated first). Mixing in the normals to the fresnel? Yeah, as I said, it gets complex quickly.

I pretty much never use fog/mist, so can’t help much there. May want to check out how its done in the classroom scene.

… but wetness can also get “over-produced!” Don’t over-think this thing. :yes:

Do just enough to make the shot work, then “get the damned thing in the can and move on to the next one.

On moisty ambients, direct light should go to the yellow/red part of the spectrum, and the indirect light should be more blue.
Surfaces are a bit more glossy when wet, and darker (depending on roughness)
Is faster to appear dirt everywhere than a mushroom in the floor or an ivy through the window.
[SUB](Is there someone going into this place once a week to clean the dust or wipe the floor?)[/SUB]

Hi Guys! I’m New of the blog and I have a question: There is a way to export the render with Ambient Occlusion, fresnel, shadows, alphas, z deepth etc…as photoshop layers? I would try to composite the render in photoshop and I wondered if you have any tutorial to reccomend.
thank you!