hopefully i chose the right forum…
I was wondering if there was a simpler way to animate rain, as opposed to animatin a bunch of drops, then movin them downward at a certain speed, cause then u gotta have more drops comin down on top of them an so on… is there an easier way? or maybe someone could give me a tip as to how they’ve done it…
also, (hate to ask 20 questions) i know in animation they reuse the same background, say when a character is runnin, i know how to loop things, but is there a way to take one drawing, have it movin in the background an then start over again? in a constant loop, so u wouldnt hafta draw an entire hall way, jus part of one?.. hope that makes sense… thank u for ur time…
Not sure about part1 Preacher Man but for part2 of your question I have one method you could try:
Stitch two elements (hallway scenes?) together by half overlapping 2 peg/element layers in the timeline and repeating this for however long you want time wise.
I posted a similar thread under the title “Repeating movement of background” in the Scene Planning section.
As far as I can see there is no way to infinately loop the start frame to the end frame as in say Flash.
…I came back after some more thought…
It might be possible to use the same technique mentioned above to produce “rain”.
I was thinking, depending upon the type of rain you want (from beautifully drawn drops to simple lines or dashes), you could create one drawing element and fill it with “rain” (extend the frames as required) then copy this to several other drawing elements.
Then using either the element cycle or the timeline/peg methods of looping you could then repeat lashing rain motion across the camera’s FOV.
It was just a thought.
Just make four or so random drawings of sheets of rain and cycle them. Rain falls faster than the eye can follow, so you don’t need to worry about animating the downward motion of the drops.
Add a few more layers receding into the distance.
Probably the neatest way to do it would be to:
1) go into Photoshop
2) apply a random “noise” filter to an empty layer
3) use motion blur to get the noise to look like streaking raindrops
4) delete the background layer
5) export as a .png file with transparency
6) import into Toonboom as a foreground image layer.
7) repeat to get a bunch of random frames in sequence, then cycle them as I outlined above.
The reason I mention this is that the blurry rain will look more realistic than the hard-edged vector shapes you’ll get in Toon Boom and won’t interfere so much with whatever is behind it. I haven’t actually tried this, though.
thanks for the help…
i’ve figured the rain out, seriously, i was makin it more difficult on myself then it needed to be 
as for the loopin background… havnt tried it yet, but what i’ve read seems like some solid solutions, thanks again