Hey everyone! Just bumping up this topic to show something cool.
Now, as you may know this particular trick cannot be used on textures or anything like that so that means realistic puddles are out of question right?
WRONG!
You can actually create a realistic puddle effect by using a UV-Mapped Block with Surface Appearance on it and two layers of reflection.
I never thought of it initially but look how freakin’ awesome this looks!
You might ask, “How in the hell do I achieve that?!”, it’s not hard actually!
First you need a PBR texture set, ColorMap, NormalMap, RoughnessMap and MetalnessMap.
You can create roughness map by putting a fully white 512x512 background into photoshop and taking the brush and painting black spots that represent puddles.
Once you’ve done that you can freely export it. To create a metalness map just invert the existing roughness map.
Now the trick here is… You put your ColorMap texture into Photoshop, then your RoughnessMap over it, change the opacity of the Roughness so that you can see your Color, then select the color map in layers, select eraser tool, put hardness to zero and then start carefully creating holes in your colormap based on where the black spots in your Roughness are.
This is how ColorMap should end up:
And this is how Roughness looked like:
Now once you’re done, put everything into SurfaceAppeareance, and put AlphaMode to Transparency:
Now you ended up with this uh, asphalt full of holes, yes:
So it’s time to layer stuff!
Now create a part the same size and position of your block, and apply a glitch to it!
Now move it super close to the block, make sure it doesn’t cause z-fighting!
You might think it’s done but not yet! You can see the bottom through the holes!
So let’s put an addional layer, this time, glass once again, but with Reflectance set to 1 and Transparency to 0
And put it super close again but make sure it wont cover the reflection layer!
Boom. Problem solved.
Sorry if you don’t understand this tutorial, I woke up like 2 hours ago, still a zombie y’know…
Now there are some issues with this method of course.
First, you can see graphical artifacts in a form of noise and texture banding:
and Second, if you use this trick in any other lighting technology other than Future you’ll see this:
I have no idea what this is, probably an artifact due to Ambient Occlusion.
Future Lighting in comparison:
HOWEVER, this can easily be fixed by changing transparency of our Block to a very low number:
Wow! Not only we fixed the AO issue, but also eliminated noise and banding!
Hopefully we’ll see some games use this trick. I’m really looking forward to see how people will pull off rain in their games.
