There is something incredibly meditative about watching it rain while warm and dry from the comfort of shelter. For this piece, I wanted to capture that feeling and expose the beauty of rainy days even if they sometimes inconvenience us.
This scene was constructed and rendered in Unreal Engine 5 using mostly Megascans assets and Ultra Dynamic Weather for the heavy rain effect. I decided that my goal for this piece was to try and match the reference as close as I could, but within a reasonably short time frame. I started by roughly blocking out the walls and table, then set up my camera. I went with a moderately high focal length to get some depth of field blur in the background, and used a sensor size of 20mm x 26mm to crop up the frame to match the photo.
The puddle ripples shader was created in the material editor with a little help from Ben Cloward’s Rain Puddle Shader tutorial on YouTube. I used the Modeling Tools plugin in Unreal to create the cobblestone; using the Displacement tool to add the stones with a displacement map from Quixel, and the deform tools to add the main dip for the puddle.
For final steps in Unreal, I adjusted the height fog to react nicely with a few rect lights in order to achieve the hazy bloom at the top. Each material went through various minor tweaks to match color and roughness. I quickly animated a slight camera bob in sequencer, and set up an OpenColorIO config asset to use the ACEScg color configuration. The scene was rendered in 2k Square with Movie Render Queue.
To wrap it up, I rendered the image sequence using DaVinci Resolve. The ACEScg color conversion drastically improved the color output and reduced the amount of manual color correction needed in edit. I composited a couple looping rain sound effects, and bounced out the final result. It is far from a perfect 1:1 match, but as a sort of non-official speed build, my personal goal was met.
The reference photo for this scene was discovered on a blog about a garden in Castello Di Galeazza, a 14th Century castle in Italy that tragically took severe damage from an earthquake in 2012. According to the blog dates, this photo was taken only months before the event by the tenant/gardener at the time.
Blog Post reference:
[Castello Di Galeazza Garden - YouTube](https://Castello Di Galeazza Garden - UE5)
Link to Artstation: ArtStation - Castello Di Galeazza Garden - UE5
