Pixel Art Rain Shader
Date of Recording: 2020-11-30
Working on more environment systems, this time it's a rain effect. Selling the atmosphere of rain is a matter of layering together a bunch of individual effects:
1. streaks representing rain drops
2. splashes on all gently-sloped ground
3. spatter on the top edges of objects on screen
4. ripples in the water
5. mist blowing around the scene
6. randomized bobbing of the upward-facing leaves on trees
7. lightning flashes (with sharp shadows)
8. color grading
Most of the effects are built on the GPU using a few tiling/looping textures and a single post-processing draw call, obviating the need to compute particle effects on the CPU or transferring buffers between CPU and GPU memory, making it a very lightweight effect to compute. The downside is that the effect does not show well while the camera is rotating.
