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