The very long awaited and featured rain over water sequence is now complete in tutorial form! This tutorial is in 3 parts detailing the initial texture, creating the water, and creating the rain, all completely inside After Effects. This one has been a long time coming and i’ve had a lot of requests on how to do it so i hope this satisfies you guys. Any questions, you know where to ask them.


As mentioned in the tutorial, the hi-rez quicktime version of the effect can be found here right click, save as.

This cool effect in After Effects was made as part of an expressions mini-site i’m working on. You can come up with a tonne of different looking effects with this so have a play around and see what you can come up with. The tutorial itself is largely just an exercise in what you can do with stacking effects in AE, with a few extra tricks thrown in such as handling cameras and a tiny bit of expression work to make our life easier. Those of you who have watched previous expression tutorials will recognise the trend i’m going with in making a controller null object to handle all our composition variables.

As promised, the tutorial on creating a particle system purely with expressions in Adobe After Effects. AE offers a powerful scripting and expression language and in this tutorial we delve into some of the possibilties with expressions and expand upon the earlier Falling Drop tutorial by showing how you can replace plugin based particle systems with your own expression-based system.

I’ve just finished an introduction to expressions tutorial where we create a type writer style effect in After Effects as a stepping stone into expressions, but also as a taster to the upcoming particle generator tutorial. Hopefully this will make some of the trickier aspects of expressions a little easier to understand for people unused to programming and be a good starter for future expression work.

Included in the tutorial:

• Pickwhip parenting
• Mathematical expressions
• The Math.round() method
• The time variable
• Expression controls

As promised, the Falling Drops tutorial is complete.


You won’t need a particle generator for this one when I get out my expression-based particle system tutorial, coming soon. I mention this in the tutorial; basically i’ve got in the making a particle generator made of expressions rather than by a plug-in, that i’ll demonstrate this effect with. For the purposes of the length of this tutorial the expression-based particle generator will be released in another tutorial, for this one we’re using Particular. But fear not, this effect will be completely demonstrated without the need for said plug-in as soon as the expression tutorial is complete, so look out for that.


Click here for background image

A quick tutorial on setting up a multi-machine render using After Effects. Simple, but effective. This allows you to set up a system on your home network (if you have one) to utitlise your spare computers to render individual frames and return them to the server to get through your image sequence faster; very useful for those long renders and when you can spare the power.

The Matrix Raining Code:Reloaded, this time with Particular and a much more stylised kind of effect using a custom particle. I’ll be going on to make something on this in 3D but still in AE, using AE’s 3d space to adapt the effect which is looking pretty good at the moment, but you might have to wait a while before it’s finished. Regardless, this is a cool effect.


The font used can be found here

Another link in the chain on the Particular season, this one is made up purely using Particular (well, almost) and as demonstrated can be put to use to come up with a number of different and interesting kinds of effects, i touch on this a little in on the VFX page too.

I came up with this effect using Trapcode’s Particular with a simple custom particle used in a slightly unconventional way. Simple effect and one of the start of the Particular season i’m running here at rhys-works.com, so check it out.


I know a couple of you have been long awaiting this one so i’m sorry for the delay, hope it’s worth it, enjoy.

The long awaited lightsaber tutorial remake. Credit to Ryan Wieber and MasterZap for the methods combined here.


A few things of note, i failed to specify at the start of the tutorial how to duplicate layers; it’s ctrl+d. Also, if when going through your frames the handles on your bezier curves get a little muddled and elongated, which can be a pain to correct, ctrl+click to remove them, then ctrl+click again to reinstate them on every frame for the curve mask points and it’ll be a fast way of getting a nice clean curve back. Thanks again for that one MZ.


Visit the tutorial page to download the project file