Our team is pulling back the production curtain to show us how they created the incredibly realistic-looking rain effects for the Carolina Hurricanes Player Intro Animations.

Video Transcription: 

Hey everyone, welcome to another edition of How It’s Made here at PEG.

Today, we’re looking at an effect we recently created for the Carolina Hurricanes. This was for their player headshots, and the concept was to show a billboard on a very rainy day—or more dramatically, in the middle of a hurricane.

During this scene, the idea was to show not only rain reflected in the headshot and throughout the 3D movement of the scene, but also water effects that make it feel like you're seeing it through a camera lens. I’ll show you how we pulled that off—so let’s dive in.

Here’s the finished product.

As you can see, we’ve got rain falling throughout the environment and these nice water droplet effects on the lens. The whole scene really feels like the 3D camera is caught in the middle of a storm, and the animation loops seamlessly.

Now, let’s break down how we built this in After Effects.

This is one of those effects that looks more complex than it actually is. Part of it is pretty straightforward, and part of it is a bit more technical.

Let’s start with the easier part: the water droplets.

Here’s the base layer in After Effects. Like many of our 3D visuals and animations, this was originally made in Cinema 4D, with post-processing and finishing work done in After Effects—pretty standard for most of our Cinema 4D workflows, since After Effects gives us more control in post.

At the bottom here, you can see the actual image sequence. We also brought in camera and light data from Cinema 4D. Many of the lens flares and lighting effects were added in After Effects.

Now, about those water droplets—these are actually just a movie file. They might be hard to see clearly, but they’re essentially gray, cloudy shapes with soft feathered edges. What they do is simulate the visual distortion that water on a lens causes—they darken areas slightly and reduce contrast, just like real droplets would.

But that by itself doesn't fully sell the effect.

To push it further, we added a second layer—Water Droplets Displacement. This one’s harder to play back in real-time because it’s resource-intensive. What it does is use a displacement map effect. That means it reads the dark values from our original water droplet footage and displaces the underlying image to simulate light bending through water.

This adjustment layer applies the displacement to everything beneath it, and once it’s turned on, you get that convincing “water on a lens” wrap effect—just like if you were filming in a rainstorm without a proper cover.

That’s how we handled the water-on-lens element.

Now for the rain in the scene—that part's trickier.

For this, we used a plugin called Trapcode Particular. It generates rain particles that exist in 3D space and react to camera movement.

You might wonder: why not just use stock rain footage?

The key difference is that Particular reacts to the camera system properly. We imported the camera file from Cinema 4D into After Effects, so now we have a matched virtual camera. Particular uses that camera data to generate realistic rain that moves correctly as the camera pans, tilts, or flies through the scene.

So, we built a large 3D environment inside After Effects where the emitter generates rain particles. Then, a camera with an identical motion path to the one from Cinema 4D flies through it. That’s how you get the realistic effect of rain shifting and wrapping as the camera moves through the stormy scene.

You probably noticed in After Effects that the rain and the water-on-lens effects are actually two entirely separate systems. They’re not on the same layer. One uses a plugin, the other uses custom footage and displacement effects. But combined, they create the full illusion—and that’s how we sell the idea of being in the middle of a hurricane.

That’s it, guys—thanks again for joining us for another episode of How It’s Made with PG. See you in the next one!