Easy Rain allows artists to create highly-realistic rain using a Blueprint system and harnessing Niagara particles. With it, you can create light rain, or stormy summer downpours in seconds. Easy Rain is aimed for both Games/Realtime, Offline Rendering, and runs well on lower-end GPU's. When combined with the Movie Render Queue, Easy Rain renders beautiful, falling rain that motion-blurs in a realistic way.
Easy Rain also includes two Material Functions to easily puddles and/or leaks/droplets to your landscape or models. This World Puddle Material Function supports Nanite Tessellation/Displacement for realistic results, but is not dependent on nanite work. It also supports rippling effects, and full art direction capabilities such as controlling the amount, the falloff, and the general breakup patterns on the accumulated rain puddles themselves.
Disclaimer: Requires Mesh Distance Fields to be enabled in Project Settings. Solution and workaround shown in the documentation tutorial!
Is there a way to make an invisible plane with this material? I tried to just make a plane in blender & alpha on it but couldn’t get it to work. Ie. a transparent flat plane with puddles/drops to place on top of stuff to “fake” the effect (rather than modifying materials).
Hi! I’ve got an issue with puddles MF. Puddles appear white on my landscape material. I made sure to follow your landscape material setup in the example material but they’re still flat white in my level. Where should I look to resolve this issue?
How can I get this working with the Path Tracer? What do I have to do in the Sequencer, and are there any special settings in Easy Rain I need to enable?
Hi, it works with pathtracing! There isn’t anything you need to do. If you’re not seeing it in the viewport, thats normal, the raindrops fall too quickly and pathtracer is too slow to render that. But if you render with movie render queue, you’ll see, everything works fine!
When I get my footage into Davinci, the rain moves at a much much faster speed than in the unreal viewport. I’ve been playnig with the “Custom Speed” and “Rainfal Speed” parameters, To the point that the particles move very very slowly in the viewport… but after re-rendering and bringing the footage to davinci, the sedult is the same, the rain moves to fast and there is some kind of flickering effect on it too.
Hi!
Yes indeed you are correct, there is an issue here, and it’s a bug on my end.
I’m uploading a new version as I type this, so it should be updated within a day!
Thank you so much for the heads up!
I am using both Easy Rain and Easy Snow. They add a lot to my environment.
However, I have not been able to get the Snow State and Rain State variables to control the effects of the Material Functions (e.g. snow or rain dripping on materials). I would have expected that turning off the rain would also stop the material effect of water dripping. Any idea what I am doing wrong?
In case it helps other, I added two flags to the MP_WF_WorldData Parameter Collection (one for global water material enable/disable and one for snow). Then I read from these parameters in the respective material functions for snow and water and just lerping each of the material attributes (e.g. Base Color) with that parameter value.
And I set the scalar parameter in the BP UpdateSnowValuesTickRate/UpdateRainValuesTickRate function.
Though I wonder if there is a solution that allows for controlling this in a world where there can be multiple weathers playing out at once across different biomes.
Hi! The Rain/Snow states refer only to the falling rain and snow VFX exclusively, they don’t affect the snow or rain material settings. This is largely by design, as I dont necessarily want my snow to disappear on my materials, nor do I necessarily want my dripping water to disappear either.
That said, I could add the rain ripple material to be affected by this, that is true.
As of now, in terms of controlling multiple weathers, they weren’t intentionally designed to work like in unison like that though I could build a system that hooks them up together. The variables are all quite similar and driven by the state settings. If you just hook up the rain/snow state to a controller, you’d have your own system. EasyRain/Snow was intended to be able to add them quickly in a barebones fashion as to avoid any bloat. Sometimes you just really need rain and only rain and just want to be able to place it quickly and art direct it quickly without having to navigate through a million other settings like other weather systems.
