Unreal® Engine Plugin: Wetness Material Library – Readme

• Author: Copyright 2023 Roland Bruggmann aka brugr9. All Rights Reserved.
• Profile on UE Marketplace: https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/profile/brugr9
• Profile on Epic Developer Community: https://dev.epicgames.com/community/profile/PQBq/brugr9

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Fig.: Screenshot of Unreal® Engine Plugin "Wetness Material Library" in UE Editor

Description

1. Features

• Darkening Albedo Master Material (cp. [Brinck, 58ff])
• Refraction based Material Instances (cp. [UEDoc, Using Refraction]): Air, Diamond, Glass, Ice, Plexiglas, Water

2. Branches

• main: README
• UE_4.26: Plugin

3. Elaboration

The visibility of water depends on the wetting of an overflowed material. A material—if not entirely hydrophobic—changes its properties if being overflowed by water. As described by [Brinck, 59ff] using the example of a puddle, typically there are four characteristic rendering regions that wet surfaces are mixed of (see figure 3.1.):

• (A) Core of the puddle, the water surface is totally flat.
• (B) Region where surface tension causes water to cling to the surface underneath, causing a shrink-wrapped look.
• (C) Region where water has saturated the surface, causing a darkening of the albedo, but not significantly affecting normals or specular response.
• (D) Dry, unmodified surface.

Figure 3.1.: Brinck – Wetness

Appendix

A. References

• [Brinck] Andrew Brinck Waylon; Maximov. Technical Art of Uncharted 4 – SIGGRAPH 2016. 6th Aug. 2016. Online: http://advances.realtimerendering.com/other/2016/naughty_dog/index.html, PDF: http://advances.realtimerendering.com/other/2016/naughty_dog/NaughtyDog_TechArt_Final.pdf (visited on 23/02/2023).
• [UEDoc, Using Refraction] Epic Games: Using Refraction. In: Unreal Engine Documentation. URL: https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.1/en-US/using-refraction-in-unreal-engine/
• [Cloward] Ben Cloward Iridescent Bubble Shader - Advanced Materials - Episode 18. In: Youtube. URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bN84YxaBEGw

B. Citation

To acknowledge this work, please cite

Bruggmann, R. (2023): Unreal® Engine Plugin "Wetness Material Library" [Computer software], Version v4.26. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International. Online: https://github.com/brugr9/Wetness

@software{Bruggmann_Wetness_2023,
  author = {Bruggmann, Roland},
  year = {2023},
  version = {v4.26},
  title = {{Unreal Engine Plugin 'Wetness Material Library'}},
  url = {https://github.com/brugr9/Wetness}
}

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Unreal® Engine Plugin "Wetness Material Library" © 2023 by Roland Bruggmann is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International