I wanted to make improvements to the wet concrete I was using in my locomotive shed image so put together this to experiment with more diverse light. The wet concrete interacts really well with the shadow and reflection of the locomotive (here, BR A3 Knight of Thistle) and other elements of the environment.
I’ve added the ability to show less water on the ground by applying a texture. In this case, I’ve scattered footprints over the platform - removing some of the moisture from the ground.
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I featured you on BlenderNation, have a great weekend!
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Thanks Bart!
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An update to the platform with rain ripples in the puddles from a sudden shower. I used dynamic paint to create a texture for the ripples and added it to the normal of the puddle shader.
nice render
can you make a new wip to explain how you did this wet road
looks very interesting but not so easy to understand
keep up the good work
happy cl
Hi Ricky,
Here’s the basics for the platform.
In some of the pictures, I’m just going for the look of a wet platform drying up after rain. In this case, I want to get the puddles looking right on the concrete. However, in the most recent post, I’m trying to go for the look of the rain actually falling on the platform. Let me cover both cases.
Firstly, the platform itself is a concrete material. This was mostly straightforward using noise and color ramps to get the colour variation and the bump. However, I also added some cracks using a voronoi node and some additional noise. Then, using adaptive displacement, I let the cracks fall into the concrete.
To get the puddles, I followed some tutorials online which basically set up a noise texture to control both the roughness (i.e., almost no roughness where the puddles are and full roughness elsewhere). The additional trick is to darken the colour of the underlying material with the same roughness to get the dark look of the damp concrete. I used the smooth step option on a map range to get a more obvious gradation of darkening for the puddles.
For the rain ripples in the puddles, I basically made the whole platform wet. I tried some variations with puddles, but it didn’t make sense for the rain to be falling enough to cause ripples in these shallow puddles, but to still have some of the platform dry. So, I basically overrode the puddles to make the whole thing reflective. The ripples themselves were created with a texture I generated within Blender. I used dynamic paint with a particle system to create this. I tried at first with the normal pass of the plane with the ripples, but that lead to some unwelcome artifacts in the material that caused the reflections to behave strangely, so I went back and created a height map from the same geometry.
Here’s the normal map that I wanted to use:
And here’s the height map that I ended up using (the geometry is actually different as I re-ran the dynamic paint simulation):
Now that I have this basic process figured out, I’ll probably go back and create a higher resolution ripple map as I think the current one is too bumpy, and I only see the ripples if I look for them.
I hope this gives you some idea of how this was created. The rain, by the way, is a pretty simple particle simulation, but after trying to use accurate rain drops with a water-like material, I reverted to using a solid material so they would register in the picture. I think this looks interesting but is not particularly realistic.
can you give the tut link
and show the nodes set up you use for the concrete
concrete looks so shiny but transparent !
did you use PBR alone with second layer
or added some glossy too ?
thanks
happy bl
The main tutorial was Blender Guru’s tutorial called “How to Create Realistic Puddles in Blender” - you can find it on YouTube. All the shaders are Principled BSDF. I’ll post some node setups after I’ve tieded them up a bit.
Adding a bit more background - new car model (Morris 10/4 1933) and a procedural brick wall that’s been in the works for a while.
That’s one nasty downpour! It detracts from the view of the locomotive…IMO
I would reduce the rain by half and also add go your dynamic paint and create a wet map for the locomotive as it is sitting high and dry, should pump up the realism 2 fold…
The whole work is really very impressive and deserves getting the featured row!!
Nice job!
something is missing from the rain, the splash effect, I found a good tutorial video maybe this can help you
Regarding the rain distracting from the train - that’s for sure. I guess I imagine this in the context of other pictures that are more focused on the train. I’m trying to explore environments for these locomotives to be realized in. I’ll make some renders with less rain - perhaps trying to capture the moment when the rain is just starting.
Adding the rain to the loco will be more work. I’m in the process of re-writing my material library and this should make it possible to fluently add on water effects (just like dirt, snow, etc.)
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All quite believable to my eyes except the last one – I don’t believe that rain.
As for all the others … didn’t you know that it’s in bad form to post obviously real photographs as though they were 3D? 
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@sundialsvc4 curious to know - do you mean the rain isn’t believable as rain? Or that it does work in this picture?
I agree with him, it seems same “color” for the rain without transaparency. Rain is water, mostly transparent so most of “color” should be reflection.
@Bullit Clearly need to work on the rain. I did a render with mostly transparent rain but it didn’t read in the image. I’ll try that again and share it here to see what folks think. I need to do some research to see what others have had success with.