Captain's Table Project - Rain Puddles Decals

 Making Rain Puddle Decals

    I had make a rain particle effect for my Captain's Table environment not too long ago. However, when I was making it, although I was thinking about how the rain is going to affect my textures, I wasn't really thinking about how the rain was actually quite heavy, therefore I should do more than just add moisture to my materials. This is something that one of my tutors pointed out and it made me think about adding actual puddles. Making puddles wasn't something that I knew how to do so I did my research and found out about Decals in Unreal Engine. I thought that  learning how to do those would be so beneficial for the future.

    I watched a couple videos on YouTube, but I would like to credit this one because this is the one that I found not only most helpful, but also most simple to understand for anyone that would like to learn how to make effects such as puddles - Create a Puddle Decal Generator for Unreal Engine 4 with Substance Designer - YouTube. Basically, I followed this Substance Designer tutorial and started out by using Grunge Maps. Technically, you can use a combination of whichever ones you like the most in order to create the shape of puddles that you would like to have in your scene. Then, you would like to blend all of the Grunge Maps that you've used together and add an opacity channel to your graph. Once you've connected your nodes, you would like to export your Normal, your Roughness and your Opacity maps - for puddles in particular, we don't really need maps such as metallic or ambient occlusion so exporting them isn't really necessary. 

    Once we import our maps into Unreal Engine, we would like to plug the Normal RBG in Norma, the Opacity RGB in Opacity and the Roughness RGB in Roughness. The only thing we need to make sure of is that in each one of our maps, sRGB in not ticked. Then, in the Material Property, we would like to change the Material Domain to Deferred Decal (because we're creating a Decal), the Blend Mode to Translucent because water is transparent, therefore we would like our puddles to be transparent and finally Decal Blend Mode to DBuffer Translucent Normal. 

Result

    Making Decals is a very non destructive type of workflow for certain things such as puddles because for example, I was able to resize the Decal and place it wherever I want, as well as duplicate it as many times as I wish. This made it quite easy to scatter the puddles everywhere and give my scene more sense.