Context of Practice 3: Unity Rain Test

When looking more into particle systems I wanted to do a quick test to look at rain as well, just in case I needed to use it at all, and to test out a few other ideas that I had with producing it. I started with an simple set up for the scene and used a plane and added in a first person character in order to be able to see the rain in action. 

I then added in the particle system and messed around with a couple of the settings to get the rain looking more like rain instead of dots floating through the sky. I changed the bilboard to be stretched to create this effect.

These settings below are the final ones that I went with to create the rain, I found that I got to this stage fairly quickly and was soon very happy with the rain. At this stage I also looked into how I could get the rain to bounce off the surface which wasn't as difficult as I previously thought. I did spend a little bit of time at this stage getting the correct settings as close to real rainfall as I could in order to make it look as realistic as possible for the final outcome.

This then below is the final look to it at the moment before I added in a sky box just to bring the scene to life slightly. The sky box that I added quickly was just one that came with Unity just to bring a moody atmosphere into the scene more and make it more realistic.

I then added in an ambient light to flood the whole scene with colour and tried to match up the colour to the clouds to create this nice seamless look to the shot. I then also added a slight colour onto the particles themselves in order to tint them slightly to make them darker.

This then is the final shot of the sky with the rain failing down and I am very happy with the look and mood that has been created. I really like the stretched look of the rain and really wanted to take what I've learned from this test and use it to adapt my snow further to make it seem even more realistic.

Finally I thought about adding the particle system onto the first person controller. As it was part of a box mesh there would also be particles all around the character and this seemed to work really well. This is then something that I will take into my final level to adapt the snow further and to get it looking even better without having to create thousands of particles to fill a large area. This way I will only have to create a few hundred.

Below is the final video which shows the whole rain test, concentrating on getting the rain to look as realistic as possible with heavy rain conditions and getting it to fit into the environment in the best way possible by adding in a slight bounce as it hit the floor and getting the colours to give it that more moody and sinister look. I am very happy with the final look and have learned some little tricks that I will be added into my final snow scene.