A small nature scene with light rain creating ripples on a pond in an overcast day.
This was mostly a test to use Houdini 20's ripple solver. I find it extremely easy to use, fast and creates great results. Planning to use that on bigger scale liquids, like oceans maybe.
For the environment I used Unreal with the Quixel assets, they never disappoint to be honest. Another test was to see how I can import the ripples to Unreal. I used alembic to export and import. Can't say it was the best experience because it is heavy and takes a lot of RAM/time to import into Unreal. I am looking into some Vertex Animated Textures (VAT) options which helps with transferring anything to Unreal but it is not that straightforward and I couldn't make it work with this particular effect. However VATs look promising so will dive deeper into those when I have some time.
If you look closely you can see the ripples do not have that high polygons so you can see pick the faces on them. In Houdini I was able to create more polygons hence better looking water but I was not able to import that mesh to Unreal. The reason is PC specs, I kept running out of my 32GB RAM crashing Unreal. Maybe there is a more clever way to export it but I had to accept this one for now.
Used Niagara particles for the rain drops inside Unreal. Pretty easy to be honest but I tend to get lost in all the values and settings of the menus.
As always used Fusion (Davinci Resolve) for some post processing like color correction and glows.
Light Rain on a Pond