help making realistic "in the rain" look

TactMasterZero

basically, I want to create a realistic character on a motorbike, in the rain. wet hair, wet face, wet goggles, wet leather clothes, wet windshield, etc...

so i'm looking for advice on creating a "beaded raindrops on hard surface", "rain streaks" or "sweat" type of texture that can be layered into a shader?...

...or however to achieve this look i'm after

.Wiki

If you want to make it realistic, create a hemisphere and scatter it with a point cloud and a weightmap on top of your mesh. So you can paint where you want the raindrops to be. And simply assign a nearly black material with high spec and refractions enabled.

When you´re only going for some special textures because its lowpoly. Take a normalmap and paint your drops as little dots and streaks on top of your mesh. Add a specular and glossmap to control the behavior of your waterdrops and then mix those maps with the underlaying object material.

Rain streaks are simply fast falling materials with a stripe texture. Simpy just a photoshop wind effect with high contrast.

Sweat would be the same like the raindrops.

seth.

not sure if this is what you are after but MM did this:

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showpost.php?p=1917377&postcount=11248

and shows a breakdown of his maps here:
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showpost.php?p=1917473&postcount=11256

TactMasterZero

thanks! that explanation and those links are exactly what I needed to get me going

TactMasterZero

now that I know how it's done, I thought i'd show a couple of tiling textures I made in photoshop and mudbox. I applied the normal and spec maps to the "reflected chrome" material and tried out a few of the lighting presets to see how it might look...