Oh wow, this is great. I just tried it out and works really well.
I moved the components over to my character blueprint so I don’t need to have a separate actor following the character around and it works fine. There is a number of rendering features that can be turned off on the scene capture as well to improve performance further. Pretty much everything except for bsp, meshes, landscape and foliage really.
I also set up a rain particle effect in Niagara instead of Cascade, since that is the way of the future and all works fine with that too. This looks better and runs a lot faster than using CPU particles with collision, which is what I was doing before.
The only downside of the GPU particles is you lose the trace collision that the CPU particles had, which I was using to then spawn little splash particles where the rain hits the ground. However, I’ve come up with an idea that might work, just not 100% sure how to do it. Perhaps you can offer some advice.
I’m thinking of creating a splash particle effect that just spawns splash mesh particles at random (in the x,y plane) around the player up to a certain radius and let the material control the z. So in the splash mesh particle material, I could perhaps sample the same scene render target and use it to set the z position to render the splash at in world space. That way the splash will always render where the rain stops (i.e. on the ground or roof, etc…) if that makes sense. Do you think this would work? Any pointers on how I could specify the z position of a pixel for a splash mesh particle from the scene render target?