Matrix Rain

Lets glowing code rain down the picture, and the figure appears in the falling characters. For digital worlds, hacker scenes and a person who turns into data.

Group: Text & Glyph · How to add an effect

Matrix Rain

Original

Use it for: a digital world or a computer inside the story · a figure that dissolves into data · an alarm or a system failure, in red.

• Rain Color – the colour of the code: green, cyan, red or any other.
• Trail – how long the fading tail behind each falling head is, as a share of the gap to the next drop in its column. At 0 only the heads fall, like single sparks; 0.5 gives the classic streaks; at 1 a tail fades out just as the next head arrives, so the columns are almost always lit. The tail fades from the full colour at the head to nothing at its end. 0 to 1, default 0.5.
• Speed – how fast the drops fall.
• Background – how strongly the figure glows behind the code.

Tip: set Black Level to about 0.2: the rain stops on the dark stage, and only the lit figure is drawn in falling code (the Code Portrait preset).

Pick one in the Preset row of the effect card. It sets all controls at once, in one undo step, and the row then shows its name until you change something. A control with keyframes keeps them, and the card says so.

Digital Rain – green katakana and digits that rain over the whole frame, like the code of the films; a faint glow keeps the figure. The katakana come from the Japanese font of your system (see Custom Ramp). For the classic digital world.

Code Portrait – only the lit figure is drawn, in green digits with long trails; Black Level 0.2 leaves the dark stage empty and black. Calm and precise: a person scanned, remembered or rebuilt by a machine.

Binary Storm – fine zeros and ones in cold cyan that race down densely over the whole frame, with long trails; the figure glows in the storm. Restless and technical: data flowing, a system under load.

Red Alert – large red digits with short trails that fall fast, their heads flashing pale. For danger, an alarm or a system that breaks down.

Style – switches to another look of the glyph engine, for example Retro Matrix, Symbol Matrix or ASCII. Controls you changed keep their values and keyframes when the new look has the same control; the others start at the new look’s defaults. Rain Color and Trail belong to Matrix Rain alone. Undo brings the old look back.

Cell Size – how big one character is. 8–10 gives a fine drizzle of code, 14 the classic look, 24 and more large characters that read on a projection; at 72 the frame holds only 15 rows, so only a few drops are on screen at a time. The drops fall by whole rows, so large characters also fall faster across the frame. It counts pixels of a 1080p picture, so the preview, the thumbnails and a 4K export show the same grid. 4 to 72 px, default 14 px.

Amount – how much of the effect you see. At 0 the original picture, unchanged; in between, the rain fades in over it. Keyframe it to let a scene dissolve into code on a cue. 0 to 1, default 1.

Background – how strongly the picture glows behind the code, in the Rain Color. At 0 only the falling characters show on black, and the figure reads in their brightness alone; 0.3 lets her shape glow softly, brighter wherever a trail passes; towards 1 she becomes a bright, solid shape in the rain. The glow is soft: a slightly blurred copy of the picture, not a square per cell. Dark parts of the picture stay dark at any value. 0 to 1, default 0.3.

Black Level – the brightness up to which the picture counts as black. Everything darker gets the first character of the ramp, the space in most ramps (with Invert Ramp the last, densest one), and keeps it, even at Roll 1: the rain goes out there, so a grey stage turns black and only the lit figure is drawn in code. The rest of the picture spreads over the whole ramp and the glow. Try 0.15–0.25 on stage footage. 0 to 0.9, default 0.

Invert Ramp – swaps the ends of the ramp: dark parts get the dense characters and bright parts the sparse ones, like a negative. The rain still glows brightest where the picture is bright. The higher Roll, the less it shows. Either on or off, default off.

Ramp – the row of characters the rain is built from, from the darkest to the brightest part; each cell draws its character from the neighbours of its own one in this row (see Roll). Numeric ( 123456789 after a space) gives small digits in the dark and dense 8s and 9s in the light, so the figure also reads in the digits; Binary zeros and ones; Symbols dots, crosses and # and @; Standard and Detailed punctuation and letters; Blocks and Bars shaded blocks and bars that fall like streaks of light. While a Custom Ramp is typed, the row rests and the card dims it. In the menu: Standard, Detailed, Blocks, Bars, Binary and 2 more, default Numeric.

Custom Ramp – your own characters, from dark to bright, instead of the Ramp: half-width katakana and digits for the code of the films (Digital Rain), letters of a word, or a single block █ for pure streaks of light. Characters the chosen Font lacks come from another font of your system; on a system without a Japanese font, katakana show as boxes. Spaces at the end are ignored, and a ramp longer than 256 characters is thinned to 256, spread from its first to its last (the card says so). Clear it to use the Ramp again. Any text, default empty.

Font – the lettering. Monospace draws the even characters of a terminal; Serif and Sans Serif give rounder ones, each narrowed to fit its cell. Monospace, Serif, Sans Serif, default Monospace.

Weight – how heavy the strokes are. Heavier characters carry more light, so the rain gets brighter. How many steps you see depends on the font: the built-in monospace font of many systems only has regular (up to 500) and bold (600 and more). Keyframes step from one weight to the next. 200 to 900, default 600.

Rain Color – the colour the code glows in: the green of the films (the default), cyan (Binary Storm), red (Red Alert) or any other. The head of each drop flashes almost white, on the dark stage as well as on the figure, and the brightest parts of the picture glow paler than the colour itself. Pick a colour, default #29ff6b.

Speed – how fast the drops fall and how often the characters swap. At 1 a drop falls about 12 rows a second, each column at its own pace between 7 and 17, and every character swaps about twice a second; at 0 the rain hangs still; 3 and more races. It follows the playhead, so a paused picture stands still and the export matches the preview; a keyframed Speed speeds up smoothly. 0 to 5, default 1.

Roll – how far a character may stray from the character of its brightness when it swaps. At 0 every cell shows exactly that character and never swaps, so the figure reads in the characters; 0.5 picks from a window around it, so the code keeps changing while dense characters still mark the bright parts; at 1 any character can stand anywhere, and the figure shows only in the brightness of the rain. Any value above 0 draws from at least two characters. 0 to 1, default 0.5.

Trail – how long the fading tail behind each falling head is, as a share of the gap to the next drop in its column. At 0 only the heads fall, like single sparks; 0.5 gives the classic streaks; at 1 a tail reaches the next drop, so the columns are never dark. The tail fades from the full colour at the head to nothing at its end. 0 to 1, default 0.5.

Matrix Rain works in nine stages, one folder each in the Nodes tab: Cell Grid cuts the frame into square cells, Cell Sampling & Tone reads the colour and brightness in the middle of each cell, Tone to Glyph picks the character of that brightness, Rain lets the drops fall down every column and works out how brightly each cell is lit right now, Glyph Offset draws each cell’s random swaps, Roll Window keeps a swap inside a part of the ramp around the cell’s own character, Atlas Alpha looks up where the character covers the cell, Glow reads a soft copy of the picture behind the code, and Ink & Appearance lights the character in the Rain Color on that glow. Click a folder’s header to open it. Rain, Glow and Ink & Appearance make the rain; Glyph Offset works as in Symbol Matrix, Roll Window as in Glyph Matrix, the other four as in ASCII. Matrix Rain is one look of the glyph engine that the Text & Glyph looks share; its Style menu switches between them.

Smallest Component – the shorter side of the frame; divided by 1080 it scales Cell Size, so a 4K export, a portrait frame and a thumbnail show the same grid.

Maximum – the cell size in pixels of this frame, never smaller than 2.

Floor – which cell the pixel lies in, counted in columns and rows. Rain gives every column its own drops from it, Glyph Offset every cell its own swaps.

Fraction – where the pixel lies inside its cell, from 0 to 1; Atlas Alpha draws the character with it.

Divide – the middle of the cell, where the whole cell reads the picture.

Clamped Image Sample – reads the input picture at the cell centre, never outside the frame.

Split RGB + Alpha – the cell’s colour and its transparency. Matrix Rain uses only the brightness and the transparency: the colour comes from Rain Color.

Luminance – the brightness of the cell colour, weighted the way the eye sees it (green counts most).

Divide – applies Black Level: the luminance minus Black Level (Subtract), divided by what is left above it (the other Subtract: One minus Black Level). The Clamp next to Black Level keeps it between 0 and Black Level Max 0.9.

Clamp – keeps the result between 0 and 1, so everything darker than Black Level becomes 0: the Tone. It picks the character and sets how brightly the rain glows.

Subtract – one minus the tone, for Invert Ramp.

Switch – the tone as it is, or inverted when Invert Ramp is on.

Clamp – keeps the tone just under 1, so the brightest cells get the last character and never one past it.

Multiply – spreads the tone over the number of characters in the ramp.

Floor – the number of the cell’s own character: the Tone Glyph that Roll Window swaps around.

Clock – how far the clock has run: Seconds × Speed (the Multiply above it), or Speed Travel, the distance a keyframed Speed has covered, when Speed has keyframes (Greater Than checks for that). Glyph Offset counts its swaps with the same clock.

Pace Random – a random number from 0 to 1 for each column: Random (Cell) of the column (Split Vector takes it from the Cell Number) and Rain Pace Seed 1 (Combine Vector). It never changes, so a column keeps its pace.

Fall Rate – how many rows a drop of this column falls per second: Rain Rate Min 0.6 plus Rain Rate Span 0.8 times the Pace Random (Multiply, Add), times Rain Rate Base 12. So the columns fall between 7 and 17 rows a second at Speed 1, never in step.

Fallen – the clock times the Fall Rate: how many rows the drops of this column have fallen since the start.

Drop Spacing – how many rows lie between two drops of this column: Rain Spacing Min 0.6 plus Rain Spacing Span 0.8 times the column’s Gap Random (seed 2), times Rain Spacing Base 32, so 19 to 45 rows.

Phase Random – a third random number of the column (seed 3): where its drops start, so neighbouring columns never fall side by side.

Drop Phase – Fallen minus the cell’s row (Subtract, Y from the Cell Number), divided by the Drop Spacing, plus the Phase Random: how many drops have passed this cell, with the fraction telling how far the last one has fallen on.

Behind – only the fraction of it (Fraction), times the Drop Spacing (Multiply): how many rows the last head has fallen past this cell. 0 means the head is here right now; the cells above it count up to the Drop Spacing.

Remix: open the Constants folder and set Rain Spacing Base from 32 to 12: the drops follow each other closely, and the code pours down in a dense shower.

Trail Rows – how many rows the tail reaches: Trail (the Clamp keeps it from 0 to 1) times the Drop Spacing, and never less than 1 (Maximum).

Tail – one minus Behind divided by Trail Rows (Divide, Subtract), and not below 0 (Maximum): 1 at the head, falling evenly to 0 at the end of the tail.

Fade – the Tail times itself (Multiply): the light of the tail, bright behind the head and soon faint, like the films’ trails.

Head – one minus Behind, and not below 0 (Subtract, Maximum): 1 in the cell the head has just reached, fading as it moves on to the next row. Ink & Appearance turns that cell towards white.

Smooth Fade – the same Fade worked out once more at the pixel’s exact height instead of its cell’s row (the Pixel Row, and Divide, Fraction, Multiply and Maximum nodes like the ones above). Glow uses it, so the glow behind the code brightens evenly down a column as a trail passes, instead of in steps of whole rows.

Ticks – the clock (from Rain) times Index Time Scale 2: the swaps counted so far, two a second at Speed 1.

Cell Random – a random number from 0 to 1 for each cell (Random (Cell)), the same in every frame.

Cell Tick – the ticks plus the cell’s random number, rounded down (Add, Floor): every cell counts its swaps on its own, so they fall at different moments instead of all at once.

Draw – a new random number for each swap of each cell: Random (Integer Hash) of the cell’s random number and its tick (Combine Vector).

Glyph Offset – the draw times the number of characters, rounded down (Multiply, Floor): how many steps this swap moves the character. Roll Window folds it into the window around the cell’s own character.

Lit – Greater Than: is the cell’s Tone above 0, so brighter than Black Level? The other Greater Than asks whether Black Level is set at all (above 0).

Dark Roll – a Switch: 0 while Black Level is above 0, otherwise Roll. At Black Level 0 every cell swaps.

Cell Roll – the second Switch: Roll for a lit cell, the Dark Roll for a dark one. The window below is built from it, so with Black Level set a dark cell keeps its character, the space in most ramps, and the rain stays out of the dark stage.

Ceiling – the Cell Roll times the ramp’s length minus one (Subtract, Multiply), rounded up: how many neighbours a cell may swap to. Any Cell Roll above 0 gives at least one.

Window – that number plus the cell’s own character (Add): from 1 at Roll 0 to the whole ramp at Roll 1.

Floor – half the window, as a whole number (Multiply by Half first): how far the window reaches below the cell’s own character.

Window Start – the Tone Glyph minus that half, kept between 0 and the ramp’s length minus the window (Clamp). The window never hangs over an end of the ramp: the brightest cells swap among the densest characters.

Step – the cell’s own place in its window plus the Glyph Offset (Subtract, then Add).

Divide – the step divided by the window (half a step added first, so the division never lands just below a whole number); Floor counts the whole windows passed.

Place in Window – the step minus those whole windows (Multiply, Subtract): a place in the window, picked by this swap’s draw.

Glyph Index – Window Start plus the place in the window (Add): the character the cell shows now. At Roll 1 the window is the whole ramp, so any character can come up.

Floor – the row of the character on the atlas, a sheet of all characters of the ramp drawn in the chosen Font and Weight.

Subtract – its column on the sheet.

Clamp – keeps the place inside the cell half a pixel of the sheet away from the edges of the character’s square (Half Texel, 0.5 of the 64 pixels of a square, and One Minus Half Texel). The sheet is read with smoothing, so a read any closer would mix in a little of the neighbouring character: blocks and bars would show thin seams wherever a cell is not a whole number of pixels.

Sample Image – reads the sheet at the character’s square plus the place inside the cell.

Split Vector – the Glyph Coverage: 1 inside the strokes of the character, 0 around them.

Tap – the pixel’s place in the grid plus a Tap Offset (Add): a point 0.3 of a cell up and to the left of it. The folder reads four such taps, one towards each corner.

Tap Sample – the Tap divided by the cells across (Divide), read from the picture (Clamped Image Sample) and turned into a Luminance. The picture shows the first tap; the other three work the same way.

Upper Pair – the two upper taps averaged (Mix at a half); the Lower Pair does the same below.

Soft Luminance – the two pairs averaged (Mix): the brightness of the picture around the pixel, slightly blurred. It follows the pixel, not the cells, so the glow has no cell steps and is softer than the picture itself.

Divide – applies Black Level to the Soft Luminance, as in Cell Sampling & Tone: minus Black Level (Subtract), divided by the Black Span. The Clamp after it keeps the result between 0 and 1: the Soft Tone, black below Black Level.

Background Glow – Background times the Soft Tone (Multiply): bright where the picture is bright, nothing where it is black.

Ground Light – Ground Floor 0.6 plus Ground Trail 0.4 times the Smooth Fade (Multiply, Add): the glow shows at 60 % between two drops and in full where a trail passes. The Smooth Fade comes from Rain (see there).

Glow – the Background Glow times the Ground Light (Multiply). Ink & Appearance colours it in the Rain Color.

Remix: open the Constants folder and set Ground Floor from 0.6 to 0: the figure glows only where a trail passes, as if the rain lit her up.

Tone² – the Tone times itself (Multiply): a dim stage counts much less than a lit figure, so the rain in the dark drops away.

Brightness – Tone Base 0.05 plus Tone Factor 1.5 times the Tone² (Multiply, Add): faint rain in the dark parts, 1.55 in the brightest, where the colour overdrives and turns paler. This is what draws the figure into the rain.

Trail Light – the Fade from Rain times the Brightness: how brightly the tail glows here right now. Maximum takes the brighter of it and the Lit Head (below): the Light of the character.

Head Color – the Rain Color (Vector 4 to RGB) mixed towards White by the Head times Head White 0.8 (Multiply, Mix): the head of a drop glows almost white, the rest of the tail in the Rain Color.

Lit Glyph – the Head Color times the Light times the Glyph Coverage (Multiply): the character, lit.

Head Shown – two Switches: 1 in a cell brighter than Black Level (the Greater Than with the Tone), and 1 everywhere while Black Level is 0 (the other Greater Than); 0 only in a dark cell once Black Level is set. So Black Level clears the heads from the dark stage too.

Head Light – the Head from Rain times Head Light 0.85 (Multiply): the head has a light of its own that does not drop with the picture, so it flashes on the dark stage as on the figure.

Lit Head – the Head Light times Head Shown (Multiply). The Maximum above takes it when it is brighter than the trail.

The last cards of the folder put it together, as in ASCII.

Ground – the Rain Color times the Glow from the Glow folder (Multiply): the soft glow of the figure behind the code.

Glyph Cell – the Ground plus the Lit Glyph (Add): the character shines on its glowing ground, and a dim character never cuts a dark hole into it.

Faded Premultiplied – fades the untouched picture, pixel by pixel, towards the rain by Amount. Both are first multiplied by their transparency (Original Alpha, Cell Alpha), and the transparency fades the same way (Faded Alpha).

Faded Color – divides by Faded Alpha (at least a millionth) to get back to plain colour, so the colour a transparent pixel hides never shows as a dark or green fringe around a cut-out figure while Amount fades.

• Size. Cell Size counts pixels of a frame whose shorter side is 1080: a 4K export, a portrait frame, a lower Preview Quality and the thumbnails show the same grid. A cell is never smaller than 2 pixels of the frame; below 2 px Cell Size renders as 2, and the card says so.
• Rain. Each column falls at its own pace and spaces its drops in its own way, so neighbouring columns never fall in step. A tail fades with the square of its distance from the head, so it is bright just behind the head and soon faint. The head has a light of its own; the tail glows with the picture, and a dim stage counts much less than a lit figure. Trail and Roll outside 0 to 1 render as 0 or 1, and the card and the tools say so.
• Glow. The glow behind the code is a slightly blurred copy of the picture’s brightness, read at four points around each pixel, so it has no cell steps; it brightens evenly down a column where a trail passes.
• Time. The rain follows the timeline time: scrubbing, playback and export give the same frame for the same moment, and a paused picture needs no extra rendering. With keyframes on Speed it moves by the distance Speed has travelled, so it never jumps. Hours into a show the drops stay in place to well under a row.
• Characters. The whole ramp is drawn in one font size, so its tallest character spans 88 % of the cell height. Characters the Font lacks, such as katakana, are drawn from the system’s fallback font; without one they show as boxes, and the card cannot tell.
• Transparency. Each cell takes the transparency of the picture at its centre, so a cut-out figure keeps its outline in whole cells and the rain stays inside it. Amount fades the transparency back to the original’s, pixel by pixel, and mixes the colours weighted by their transparency.
• Saved projects. A Matrix Rain that stores its node setup keeps its look and its card. Before, effects saved without a stored setup loaded at Roll 1 and Background 0 and did not show the picture at all; that was a bug. They now rain with heads and tails and show the figure, in the default Rain Color with Trail 0.5. Presets fully apply only to effects added in this version: on a stored setup from before, the card has no Background, Black Level, Roll, Rain Color or Trail row, so a preset leaves those values out.
• More: Effect system · Node Catalog · Styles and presets.