the raindrops from this little scene were the result of a buttload of experimentation. i wanted a single flexible rig for both raindrop and the ripple so I could just drop a bunch of rain into a scene and swing them around into place as needed

even added a control for the raindrop's falling angle. not something i used in the final render as i'd decided i wanted the drops to fall straight down so it'd look like a still night, but hey, futureproofing!

for the ripple side of it, it's a silly overcomplicated rig. i think most dedicated animators would hate it, but I wanted to play around and explore what could be done to stylise ripples using just flat meshes and movement.

was really keen to try out an idea i'd had, getting an overlaying set of "cutout" meshes to slide towards the center, over the lit ones, and was stoked to see some promising results as i mucked around with it

and i found the original really rough plan for the rig, when i was initially trying to figure out how it could be done

i worked at it a few hours and messed around til i found an effect i really liked, this large wavering rosette, but found it was just way too busy once the fish were added into the scene.

best solution was to just suck it up and start over, making something smaller and shorter that wouldn't overwhelm the scene

the eye highlight rig was super simple; flat white meshes that are constrained to average their rotation between the viewer camera and a typical old aim control for hand-animating





and seeing how it looks on Jazz the cat (thought he needed a name at this point). his face and eyes had to be remodelled a lot to account for the highlights cutting through the mesh, but it was worth it.

for one thing the highlights really tied the look together, (this being a character designed to be mostly constructed of generously rounded geometric shapes and curved points). but as a bonus, with all that reworking the face, i got it to a place where i was way happier with the shapes and the direction it was heading in.


for the rest of the eye, it's just the UVs of the eye material being scrolled around, a technique i'd used previously after clearly forgetting what a pita it is to work with.

even whipped up an awkward face controls panel for it, just to make it slightly easier to key, but i would absolutely not let anyone else suffer to use it.

scrolling UVs for shaders in unity? easy. for scaling pupils on a character rig in maya? ehhhh.

though i don't know who i'm kidding, i know i'm going to try it again in future, the result is so clean.

my memory gets fuzzier here, i was doing some of the animation in 2020, then some final stuff the following year, overall very slow going and a lot of tweaking tiny things. but here's some fun screenshots i'd taken during the process.


top down view of the whole scene, the water plane was also rigged and animated


the viewport gets a bit hectic between the rigs for the cat, the water's surface and edge, the fish, the raindrops, the plants, the windows, and also had to set up the cat's eyes following the fish.



back view, the "lit room" is just a sphere with it's normals reversed.


holy shit i was glad to finally finish the damn thing, even with such long breaks in between working on it.

if you take one thing away from this it should be: go back and look at your old unfinished projects. there's so much crap i completely forgot about, sitting on the back burner.