VFX Inputting

With learning about VFX Niagara inputs had me rattling my brain for a bit on what I could use for my stealth game. The first thought would be that of pouring water, similar to small water, until realizing I could just put in a VFX effect of rain. With deciding on what to do, I first create a new file for my effects, inputting "Environment Effects" for later use for later inputting different environment effects and settings. Getting started, I create the Niagara system and use the fountain difficulty as the main starter. 

Fountain emitter settings and look for the sim target. Switch this to GPU compute sim. While doing that, I would find the calculate bounds mode and set it to fixed. This would help keep the rain particles visible across a large area, preventing them from disappearing if they move beyond the default bounds.

Next, the rain behavior: need to find the velocity in the emitter stack. I would need to change the velocity mode to linear. This will let me make the particles fall in a straight and steady direction. Now, when reviewing this, this just looks like pouring water; it might be useful for water fountains or sinks, but this isn’t where I want to set this at. I messed around with the velocity scale settings and input X: 50, Y: 0, and Z: -2000. The X scale gives a slight tilt to the effect, while the Y scale is used for either front or back rain direction to which I don’t need to his segment. With the Z scale, this changes the speed at how fast the particles are falling, letting me manipulate how fast I want them to be.

While this is still in progress, it's still not where I want it to be, as the particle shape is not what I want it to be. So, I go to the shape location in the emitter summary and change the shape primitive to be a box/plane. This will give me better control of the shape for the wide area, so I would change the box size scales to X: 5000, Y: 5000, and Z: 500. From doing this, the particle animation now looks like snow, which would lead me to put that discovery for a later project when implementing snow. Though for doing this, this would help control the spawning area for the raindrops, which X and Y cover the wide area, and Z sets in the thickness of the spawning area of raindrops.

Currently, the rain still isn’t where it's supposed to be, so I would go back to the emitter summary and open the spawn rate option. This would help me adjust how much rain would appear. With messing around with this option, I have the option to choose whether I want my rain to be either light, normal, or heavy, depending on the setting. I set mine to 5000 for the spawn rate, as I want to showcase a bit of heavy rain for my island level.

While the rain effect is looking better, I still need to change the shape of the raindrops, looking for a more vertical line shape. So, I would go to the Initialize Particle option under the sprite attributes option. I would change the option to non-uniform as this lets me make the raindrops thin and long with X scale determining the width of the particle, while Y scale determines how long it gets. Despite it being the shape, it’s dropping down with a wrong angle, so I would fix that by going to the sprite rotation underneath and setting it to a direct angle, for the spawn rate can rain down normally and not randomly.

The rain effect is now nearly perfect; I still need to tweak some settings for this can become better. I would go to the sprite renderer option to change the alignment to velocity-aligned. This would help point the raindrops in the direction where they’re traveling, matching the angle with either implementing wind or the falling direction. At this point, I would have just let it be the way it is now, but something was still missing in how I want it to be. Looking closely at the raindrops, they would kind of shoot down, similar to lasers, and I want to lessen the comparison by going towards the drag option. This would allow the raindrops to feel a natural falling motion.

At this step, this was perfect the way it was. Now, with implementing it at the level, this would be the hardest thing I have to struggle with, figuring out how to put it in such a wide area. At first, I would go to the bounds scale and increase the number, but it wouldn’t be enough, as it barely covers the area. It covers such a small area, even putting it at 9000000000 for scale, but barely reaches anywhere. Next, I would try to scale it to a higher number as the positive change is I can expand it to longer lengths, but what makes it worse is it stretches the particles from each other to which makes it look sad. Lastly, I decided to just put some Niagara effects just from the starting area to showcase the rain particles.

Now with a detailed input, I wanted a Niagara effect to have meaning for later usage, especially befitting for a deserted island level. This is to reinforce the idea that there will be a change in weather conditions and what it can change for gameplay. This will be utilized for more immersive gameplay, with conditions being set if rain comes, changing the conditions of having the player needing to be more stealthy and getting the wet status effect. Other features can be like having the player move more slowly in the rain, or having the advantage of noise reduction. Whether the case, this is mainly for immersive aspects since it will dull the game if there's only daylight and nighttime, but to mix in other variations on what the weather can bring for gameplay.