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Global Surface Settings

Properties in this category allow you to customize scene rain surfaces globally, meaning changing any property here will affect the entire scene unless the object's materials use a property override.

Enable Coverage

Enables coverage in materials that use Weatherade shaders. If disabled, then the shaders will act like Unity Standard shadar.

MASKS

Paintable

This option enables the ability to edit the procedurally generated coverage mask.

It's recommended to enable this option on a per-material basis, instead of enabling it globally from a coverage instance, as this can incurs a performance overhead.

You can edit very aspect of the coverage mask, such as wetness, puddles, ripples and spots, drips. Vertex colors are used for regular MeshRenderes, and Terrains use an additional texture-mask. Both can be painted with Total Brush which is included in the package.

The following color channels are used for painting::

⠀R⠀ - Wetness
⠀G⠀ - Puddles
⠀B⠀ - Ripples and Spots
⠀A⠀ - Drips

If you want to edit the entire mask, simply enable all channels while painting.

Primary Masks

This primary masks texture used for the wet surface.
This texture requires the following channel mapping:

⠀R⠀ - puddles mask
⠀G⠀ - drips mask
⠀B⠀ - drips distortion noise.

For the best results:

Use a 32-bit original texture
Disable compression in the import settings

This significantly decreases the banding artifacts on drips.

Ripples

2DArray texture used for the ripples and spots animation.

This field requires a 2DArray texture type. Weatherade samples its slices and processes them as animation frames of ripples and spots on surfaces. If you want to use a custom texture, use a flipbook texture as a source and inport it as a 2DArray. More info in Unity manual. This texture also must be imported with Texture Type set to Default and disabled sRGB.

This texture uses the following channel mapping:

⠀R⠀ ⠀G⠀ - ripple normals, used within puddles
⠀B⠀ - rain spots, used outside of puddles.

Stochastic Sampling

Enables stochastic sampling that helps eliminate visible tiling artifacts on ripples.

This option has additional performance cost, as it samples the texture 3 times instead of 1.

WETNESS

Color

A color multiplier used in coverage areas to simulate a wet effect.

Amount

Determines how wet the surface will be. Internally it multiplies the color of the base surface by the Color and adds gloss.

PUDDLES

Amount

Amount of puddles on the surface within the coverage area.

Color Multiplier

Puddles color multiplier. Use values lower than 1 to make the puddles look more deep.

Range

Puddles mask range. Adjust it to change the spread and sharpness of the puddles.

Tiling

Uniform tiling of the puddles mask.

Slope

Maximum surface slope where puddles can appear. Use low values to avoid puddles on hillsides.

See how the puddle mask rises on the hillside when too high value used:

RIPPLES AND SPOTS

Enables ripples and spots effect on the surfaces. The ripples appear within the puddle mask, and spots appear outside of it.

Amount

Amount of ripples and spots.
Weatherade uses a technique, called Texture Bombing for this feature, so this value is a number of texture fetches.

Using high values can significantly reduce performance, especially if used in conjunction with Stochastic Sampling.

If you don't plan to change the amount of ripples at runtime, you can improve performance by following next key steps:

Set this value to 1
Use a ripple texture array with the required ripple density set during the texture creation step outside of Unity.

Ripples Intenstiy

Intensity of the ripples effect on the puddles.

FPS

Speed of the ripples & spots playback in frames per second.

Tiling

Uniform tiling of the ripples & spots.

Spots Intensity

Intensity of rain spots appearing outside the puddle mask.

Spots Expansion

Intensity of spot expansion. Increase this value to get larger and denser rain spots.

DRIPS

Enables a flowing drips effect on vertical surfaces.

It's recommended to enable this option on a per-material basis, instead of enabling it globally from a coverage instance, as this incurs a performance overhead.

Drips Intensity

Intensity of the drips.

Speed

Speed of the drips.

Tiling

Tiling of the drips.

Use non-uniform values to make the drips longer, for example: X = 2, Y = 1.

Distortion

Intensity of the drips distortion. Increase this value to get more curved drip paths.

Tiling

Tiling of the drips distortion noise. The higher the value, the more frequent the distortion will be.

AREA MASK

Area mask settings allow you to control how the coverage occlusion will look. All parameters here are related to each other.

Mask Range

Range of the coverage mask values. 1 = the most soft and wide transitions between the covered and base surface.

Bias

The bias of the coverage area.
This property is needed for two things:

Fix the coverage banding and Z-clipping artifacts
Shrink/expand the coverage occlusion mask in conjunction with the Mask Range.

Internally it works similar to the shadow bias property on the Unity light sources.

It's recommended to use values around 0.05 to get better results.

Leak Reduction

Reducing coverage leaks at the cost of increasing mask hardness.

The coverage instance renders the scene depth and blurs it to get soft coverage transitions, which results in a side effect called “leakage” or “bleading”. It looks similar to well-known light leaking artifacts, because Weatherade uses one of the soft shadows algorithm, called VSM

Direction Offset

The linear offset from the original direction of the coverage instance. Values below 0 will create a stronger direction-dependent coverage mask, and values greater 0 can help add more coverage on the opposite side of the direction of the coverage instance. Internaly it just adds this value to the coverage direction mask.

The precipitation direction is given by the Coverage Instance transform.

Direction Range

Shrink/expand the coverage direction mask gradient. You can make the direction mask more hard lowering the range.

BLEND BY NORMALS

Tweaking properties here can help make coverage transitions more organic.

Strength

Amount of base surface normal map influence on the coverage transitions blending. Consider this like the well-known height blending technique, but without the need to provide an additional height map, since Weatherade simulates this using a normal map.

Power

Power of the normal map blending. This uses a smoothstep function through the faked heightmap.

DISTANCE FADE

Applied to terrains only.

This feature allows you to eliminate the tiling artifacts on terrains by blending between original textures and LOD textures with lower tiling values.

Be sure to bake your terrain LOD textures using the Terrain Utility component to use this feature.

Start Distance

The distance from camera at which the baked LOD texture starts to appear.

Folloff

The size of the fading gradient for the original/LOD texture. The higher the value, the softer the blend will be.