[UE] Rain Droplets Material
by Nate Maxwell
Lately I have been playing around with the GenerateBand material function and have been animating the coordinates using some noise maps to create rain drop ripple effects.
Using a blobular noise texture and running it through a panner and then using that result as the coordinates for a GenerateBand node, you get a circular growth pattern like the ripples of a rain drop. By repeating this blob over and over we can “simulate” a bunch of rain drops.
By offsetting the panner time with some noise, we get independent droplet movement. Here is the final “core” logic for the shader:
Finally, we can use the HeightToNormalSmooth node, if we didn’t want to make and animate a normal map ourselves, and we get some pixel height mimicking an actual splash and surface variation.
The surface (with cranked up normals for easier view):
Normal Calculation:
Here is a picture of the final logic with some various sliders for fine-tuning.
And the channel packed texture of the rain pattern and some stock photoshop noise for time offset.
