Random waterdrops [1.1, added reflections]

[Blooper]

This tutorial is available as a PDF. Click here to view or download it

 

Here's a quick and easy way to make large amounts of drops of water.

You'll need the Alpha Mask plugin and the Gradient Mapping plugin.

Open a 800X600 canvas (bigger = more drops). Render clouds at 0.75 roughness. Then, apply a Noise > Median blur at 20 radius and 50 percentage.

Then, go to Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast. Lower the brightness to -40 and pull the Contrast slider to the max.

Taking shape, isn't it? Now, apply a Gaussian Blur at around 10 radius. Then do Brightness/Contrast again, but this time with the medium setting for brightness, and 90 for contrast.

Save this as 'mask.png'. Do another Gaussian blur, same radius as earlier. Run gradient mapping, and use a black - transparent gradient.

Run Alpha mask, load mask.png, tick the 'Mix Alpha' box, and duplicate your layer once or twice. Ta-daa!

If you want to add shine to your waterdrops, save your 4th image (as in the 4th one in this tut) as 'displace.png'. Place the image you want reflecting on the waterdrops on a new layer, and use the displace plugin to distort it (load 'displace.png'). Then use Alpha Mask without loading any files (turn on mix alpha if necessary). Then, use Alpha Mask, but this time load mask.png, with Mix alpha ticked.

[Kemaru]

Awesome, very easy and quick.

[Tramojo]

Wow, cool

[sztin104]

[TruePaintNetta]

Ermm idiotic much.

Anyway, nice tut.

[Possum Roadkill]

This is a great tut Blooper. I have a use for this ! Woo hoo ! I had a much harder way of doing it and you have saved me a bunch of aggravation. Thanks !

[flip]

That looks really cool. Nice tut.

[LJXD]

I think you could have taken this tut a step further and made them look like water, instead of being that shape. Water drops arn't white, the intital idea was fine but i think it's a bit incomplete. Hoping to see some imporvements

[Blooper]

I think you could have taken this tut a step further and made them look like water, instead of being that shape. Water drops arn't white, the intital idea was fine but i think it's a bit incomplete. Hoping to see some imporvements

They're transparent, I just made the shadows more opaque so you could see them. Water doesn't color the surface it's on, it distorts it. I can't really make a tut for that, it'd change on a per-person basis. Also, I wouldn't know how.

[flip]

Augh, I can't do it again. Can you post a screenshot on what the gradient mapping should look like?

I did it once, and it turned out cool, but now I can't do it again. Poop.

[Blooper]

Load Gradient Mapping.

Right-click the gradient. Pick "Clear".

Right-click the white pointer on the gradient. Pick change color.

Click "More" access the alpha channel. Set it to 0. Press OK.

Enjoy your gradient.

I might want to add that the displacement part is entirely theoretical and probably not close to reality.

[007 Nab]

Good technique - I like how yo used blurring and contrast to anti-alias the drop's edges. That's just smart

I can see some good use for that method.

[Possum Roadkill]

Very cool and useful technique. This is what I used it for in a test for a future project. I need to figure out some things, but this is something I can really use. Thanks !

[Blooper]

Good stuff, possum.

[aguba]

Just pointing this out - instead of using Gradient Mapping, you can just run Alpha Mask to get rid of the white before blurring for the second time. Otherwise, nice results, and I love the method you used to anti-alias the drops.

[Blooper]

Nope. Alpha mask only makes full whites fully transparent. It makes med grays 50% transparent, etc. Gradient mapping makes everything black, the only changing value is transparency. :wink:

[aguba]

Hmm, not quite sure I understand you. I've used both alpha mask and gradient mapping for this tutorial and seem to get the same result. You caught that I stated to alpha mask before blurring the second time, instead of gradient mapping after blurring, yes?

[Blooper]

Same thing.

Open a 250*250 canvas, and drag a black to white gradient, top to bottom. Select the left side of the canvas, and run gradient mapping with a black - transparent gradient. Press Ctrl+I, and run Alpha masking with invert mask checked. The difference is obvious.

Get your color picker. On the gradient map side, no matter where you pick, in your HSV sliders, you'll find that V = 0. On the mask side, V = whatever it was equal to before running the mask.

In this case, it wouldn't change anything, but it's a bad habit to get into