Make a SUPER REALISTIC Weather in After Effects Tutorial

Ignace Aleya walks you through how to create and composite realistic weather scenes in Adobe After Effects. There are two tutorials here: one for creating a rain storm and the other is a snow storm. There are several steps to know. For example, you have to create the weather, composite it, and then color grade it to make it look real.

Below the videos, I’ll list a few third-party plugins that I’d recommend for creating weather effects, such as rain, clouds, snow, and other elements. I’ll also link to a few older In Depth articles about weather creation.

Make a SUPER REALISTIC Storm Scene in After Effects Tutorial

Make a SUPER REALISTIC Snow Scene in After Effects Tutorial

Plug-ins for Realistic Weather Effects

• Boris Continuum Unit: Particles – One of my favorite weather creation tools. Create Realistic Explosions, Fire, Rain, Fog, Snow and Other Organic Matter with Full 3D Camera and Lighting Control. 3D organic matter and streams.In addition, the Particles Unit is included with Boris Continuum Annual Subscription and Boris Continuum Perpetual License.
• Red Giant Trapcode Particular ships with some nice presets for weather elements.Particular is available in Red Giant Trapcode Suite and Red Giant Complete – Annual Subscription.
• If you’re looking for 3D, Next Limit RealFlow is a primo fluid generator. You can simulate not only a rainstorm, but a tsunami! Also, check out Next Limit RealFlow | Cinema 4D, Next Limit RealFlow | Maya and Next Limit RealFlow | 3ds Max.
• Insydium X-Particles is a particle system for Cinema 4D. Make rain, snow, fire, and much more complex particles.

Realistic Weather Tutorials

• In Depth: Rain Generators. This is an older article that compares rain plugins. A lot of the information in
  the article is still valid.
• Tutorial: After Effects: Realistic Rain Drop FX – Video Copilot. Learn how to create a procedural water effect with refraction in AE, without using any 3rd Party Plug-ins with this rain drop tutorial from Andrew Kramer.
• Make it Rain with Boris FX and mocha AE
• Creating A VFX Rainy Scene
• Creating a Snow Shader with Redshift and Autodesk 3ds Max
• How to make Snowy Object in Maya
• Creating snow on objects with nParticles – Maya
• MtoA 206 | Snow and Ice | Material series using Arnold 5 with Maya 2018
• Burning Question: How Do I Create Snow? Here’s another that goes way back, this time to 2014. There are still useful elements here though.