Brief description on dynamic rain...

Hey guys, James here. So in my never ending quest to love the particles more than I probably should, I came up with a "beta version" of a decent rain sequence. This is just from playing around a bit with particles and dynamics and what not and certainly isn't anywhere near perfect, but I figured I'd pass it along.
Anyone who wants a more in depth description of how to do this can ask me in class and I'd be happy to give you a brief one on one demo, but I think where I'm at now is pretty easy to figure out by playing around.

-So- begin in an empty scene by creating a poly plane of whatever size you want and raise it up somewhat in the Y direction. (for the purposes of rain however it would be best to have it a decent size...)

-Under the Dynamics tool set, with the plane selected, go up to the Particles menu and select Emit from Object. This makes a little handle of sorts appear in the middle of the plane and when you play the animation it seems like the particles are coming out of the verticies because they emit oddly. I played around in the attributes for the plane and found an option where you can select "emit from surface" and that makes it more uniform and less messy.

-You'll notice (unless my Maya is just acting up again...) that the particles go up instead of down. I think I kinda half-assed fixing it by just flipping the plane around 180 degrees (I'm sure there's a more technical way to make it work) and that fixed it. Then select the particles and add a gravity field onto them. I tweaked the strength of the gravity down to about .3, but they're still kinda floaty so you just tweak that up to wherever you want it for yourself.

-Now you will notice the particles don't really look like rain, but just like falling dust or something, so if you go to the particle attributes palette and select the particle shape tab you'll find an option to change the shape to streaks instead of points. This looks alot more like rain.

-The last thing I did was to create another poly plane underneath the first and make it a collision object so that the rain fell down and had something to crash into. It seemed to look fairly decent and if you tweak the friction settings on the collision plane the drops sort of spread a little.

Hope this helped you guys! Next week I'll post more if i've figured out how to make it sharper.
-James