Working on Rain for an Upcoming Cyberpunk Environment

Around a week ago, Senior Environment Artist at Ubisoft Massive Maarten Hof, well-known for creating outstanding scenes, announced that he started working on a new Unreal Engine 5-powered cyberpunk environment that will focus on movement and rain. Since then, the artist has already shown several informative WiP demos that showcase the creation process behind the upcoming scene. Today, let's take a look at some of these demos to learn more about Maarten's workflow.

The majority of said demos revolve around the topic of rain and puddles. Firstly, the artist demonstrated a cool rain shader for props, based primarily on Ben Cloward's tutorial on creating a raindrop shader that adds animated drops of water to surfaces.

Secondly, the artist shared a puddle test with refined ripples and realistic rain particles. The demo also shows a glimpse of the upcoming environment's pavement and neon lights:

Thirdly, Maarten showed the results of an experiment with water drips and ribbons, made using the Object Position node to get random colors for the ribbons and diversify the look of water drops. To create the ribbons' movement, the artist utilized Perlin Noise with some extra noise scrolling across the UV:

And finally, the creator showed a wonderful A/C unit with moving parts made with the Rotate About Axis node:

You can follow the creation process by visiting the artist's Twitter page.