Rain and puddle effects created with Unreal Engine.
Breakdown:
Puddle Actor:
The puddle is a deferred decal actor with controls for puddle size, wind intensity and shape variation for each puddle.
A material function derives and animates ripples from textures baked in Houdini. This function allows further control and randomization by changing the input parameters such as ripple strength, number of ripples and the width of a ripple.
Duplicating this function with an offset enables the creation of overlapping ripples where performance budget allows.
Ripple Material Function
Ripple heights
Ripple heights variation
Ripple Normals
Rain Particles:
Most (90-95%) of the rain particles are GPU Niagara particles in a small distance around the camera. The remaining 5-10% are identical CPU particles that also generate collision events to source the splashes, in an even smaller distance in front of the camera.
Rain Material:
Both the rain droplets and the splash particles use the same material with different dynamic parameter values.
