Q. Will Ripple Rain work with [insert 3d package]?
A. By referring to the manual that came with your rendering package, you can find out if Ripple Rain will work with your current setup. Look in the index to see if your package supports animated textures and bump maps. As well, confirm that your software supports the use of alpha channels in TGA files. Ripple Rain is known to work with 3D Studio Max, Lightwave, and Truespace. If you're using Ripple Rain in a package not shown, we'd like to hear from you!

Q. Does Ripple Rain adhere to physical settings from within [insert 3d package]?
A. No. Ripple Rain is a stand alone application that does not communicate with your 3d package in any way.

Q. How do I sync my animation with Ripple Rain?
A. In your 3d package, you use a keyframe editor for moving objects from one place to another. If you create a leaf which falls on a pond and you want to create a water ripple with Ripple Rain, it's easy. You simply set the emitter's active frame to the frame in your 3d package where the leaf touches the surface of the pond. Ripple Rain can also create textures called alignment guides for importing into your 3d package. These textures show rain fall and impact points along with the frame number that shows when they become active. By painting the texture onto the surface of your object, you can line up where the impact occurs. When you're ready to render your animation in your 3d package, you simply replace the aligment guides with the animated textures.

Q. How do I control viscosity?
A. When an emitter is added to a Ripple Rain project, a screen pops up which asks for information about the ripple. These parameters include how fast it moves, decay rate, decay radius, etc. The values entered determine the apparent viscosity of your final animation. Don't worry, if you want to add multiple emitters with the same parameters, you simply right click in the layout window, enter a new active frame and Ripple Rain will use the most recent parameters for the new emitter. As well, you can define variances when adding new emitters to prevent a uniform movement and decay. This is covered more in depth in the Ripple Rain User Guide which is available as a browser friendly HTML document.

Q. My bump map looks choppy or has jaggies.
A. Make sure that your texture and surface are of equal proportions. For example, a 3x3 texture may not render correctly on a 1x3 plane because of interpolation of bump map values.

Q. My ripples aren't animating.
A. Refer to your 3d package's manual for information regarding animation of textures. Keep in mind that some rendering packages have difficulty with animated textures and long file names. This can be remedied by using the old 8.3 file naming convention.