How do I animate rain?
Printed From: Pixel Joint
Category: The Lounge
Forum Name: Resources and Support
Forum Discription: Help your fellow pixel artists out with links to good tutorials, other forums, software, fonts, etc. Bugs and support issues should go here as well.
URL: https://pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=27323
Printed Date: 10 September 2025 at 8:52pm
Topic: How do I animate rain?
Posted By: Malleys
Subject: How do I animate rain?
Date Posted: 06 March 2022 at 2:55pm
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Hello everybody! I'm new to pixel art and I was reading the site's FAQ, which links to this old thread, and I found this beautiful piece: https://pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=26048&PID=219443#219443 - link
Now my question is, how did that artist did the rain? I would like to do it too and I'm sure he didn't animate each drop of rain individually! I use aserprite btw. Would you be so kind to explain it to me or to show me some good tutorials? Thank you very much. |
Replies:
Posted By: maruki
Date Posted: 06 April 2022 at 4:08am
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Hi there! I believe it was mostly done by hand, but using pattern repetition in a clever way. The artist probably made a couple of texture variations using straight lines and spread across the canvas by copying and pasting. Then he used that same frame and duplicated it, and dislocated it to another part of the canvas, selected a random part of this frame and rearranged it on the empty space, and so on for 24 frames. It isn't hard, however it's time consuming.
Because the rain is animated at 100ms, it flashes quickly so we don't notice the repetition, but it is there! It's one of the fundamentals of design and for animations like this I'd very much recommend its use. I have two examples here, the frame #5 and frame #8, look how similar they are. I think they aren't exactly the same because this is an area of attention to the viewer, so the artist retouch it there specially after animating the whole texture. You can save the gif and open on aseprite to look at it better. 
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Posted By: looloopaa
Date Posted: 21 June 2022 at 12:06am
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Wow, I never would have thought about the raindrops being illuminated like that... What an amazing detail. |