How do you add lens effects like water droplets?

Development Programming & Scripting Blueprint
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1

I think best would be post processing material (material/shader that is applied to screen output), check post processing in content examples to see how to do it. There pixel displacement example (with Unreal Engine sign), i think this example will be best basis for water droplets effect.

2

Hi there,

I’m trying to create water droplets on the camera lens but not sure how to go about it. I was thinking of a particle system that is attached the camera but not sure if that’s the best approach.

Thanks in advance.
Tam

3

In Solus game he used cascade for an blood effect like that. if you want to have more control over say the animation and such I would say go for particle system.

4

What I would have done is to have the “static” dirt or whatever in the blendables on the post processing volume, or simply drawing a material with the HUD.

Secondly I would use a dirt mask in the post processing volume, this is when you look at a light source and you can see the dirt specs more clearer when you have the dirt mask on.

For moving water droplets, the easiest way is drawing a material on top of that again and using a panner. But for the best result I would have used cascade to add a bunch of different water droplets that is facing the player and is attached right in front of the camera. this means the particles could have random speed and random paths etc. There is a LOT of options to mess around with in cascade, and get a great result faster than using materials(my opinion though, not great at materials yet)

5

For all of the lens effects in Gears3 we used a mix of post processing and Cascade.

With particles you can isolate overdraw to the sections of the screen where the VFX are drawn, and optimize for different quality settings.

In my personal opinion it is significantly easier to animate individual droplets/elements with random looking behavior, manipulating materials etc. with Cascade. A dynamic parameter also offers greater flexibility for editing/tweaking material behavior over the lifetime of an individual screen element.

6

How do you deal with camera FOV changes when using particles?

7

I was told about the Camera Lense Effect blueprint. So all good.