Comments

farss wrote on 12/7/2005, 3:24 AM
If you mean photo realistic I think you're looking at spending some serious money and time.
Depending on just what you're trying to achieve some of these things can be done with Vegas, there was a .veg around that created quite reasonably looking fire, I've used it for a fashion show backdrop.
However remember that fire creates light and the light illuminates things, that's the hard part to get realistic.
Rain is probably the easist, snow I've not seen a lot of the real thing but it does seem rather random in its movement so that could make getting it real tricky.
Lightning has much the same issue as fire, just the lightning part is pretty easy, use photoshop to draw a few bits and drop them into Vegas just a few frames long or else I'm certain there's some video of the real thing on the web, assuming it's public domain you can just mask it and composite it in Vegas.
Bob.
winrockpost wrote on 12/7/2005, 9:13 AM
Boris Red does a great rain and snow, can get lookin pretty real
AE for lightning. Never tried lightning in red.
Coursedesign wrote on 12/7/2005, 9:27 AM
GenArts Sapphire (AE and Combustion plug-in) has *by far* the best synthetic lightning. Significantly better than any other plug I've ever seen. There is a reason why it's used in a lot of Hollywood productions.

Very pricey though...

If you can use stock photos and composite those in with a little bit of trickery, you'll save money.

Particle Illusion (PI) does a great job with rain and snow, and is a lot less expensive and easier to learn than Boris Red if you don't have that already.

Fire is among the most difficult effects. PI can do it quite well, but you must mix in some smoke to make it photo realistic.