Idea: Animated wet surface textures

[TehDave]

Just found by digging around that the appearance of wet surfaces when it's raining is controlled by BGSMs for various materials found in Materials/Template. This BGSM's effects are layered on top of the model's existing BGSM and fade in as a rainstorm picks up

 

My question is, would it be possible to add an animated diffuse/normal/spec to these BGSMs and thus create the appearance of water hitting/running down surfaces being hit by rain? The simple increase in shininess is pretty lackluster on its own and I feel like being able to see the water running down surfaces and splashing against the ground would make heavy storms look even better.

[TheSpaceShuttleChallenger]

a) I'm not going to say for certain that the engine would spit up the files, but it would probably spit up the files. It's like a toddler that only eats grilled cheese and only if it's prepared exactly the way it likes it.
b) If by some chance you did get such a thing to your work, it would kill your frames dead.

[TehDave]

Not so sure it would make the engine upchuck since all of those material files are just standard BGSMs with no textures defined because it's just adding spec to the texture that calls it. Framerate maybe but I figure that any textures I did use would be small and lightweight (no 4k ultra hd raindrops).

 

The only change really would be adding my textures where there were none previously.

[jcdenton2012]

I think implementation is key here. Assuming this is some sort of overlay texture to the existing game textures which shows running water along surfaces you'll have to do away with distance render of the effects and limit it to an up-close render only of an effective LOD range. In short, where the LOD texture drop off occurs is where you'll want to limit this effect. I say this because I don't think anything other than maybe a "Beast Rig" could handle processing all those textures layers. I think it is potentially possible, but getting it to work without causing a game crash from performance would be a serious issue. I'm thinking that the only way to get this to work would be to create a custom LOD of the Commonwealth and assign the texture layer manually to the custom LOD chunks. That should cover the terrain textures and meshes. The terrain objects would be a totally different problem entirely. I have no idea in hell how you would go about that. Perhaps you could assign a new texture graft for each object... but my god... there's hundreds of exterior nifs...

[TehDave]

The framework is already there, I'm not adding a new system or anything, just piggybacking off of what already gets applied to every single object when it rains. Normally these BGSMs only add additional spec to the object and nothing else but what I want to do is add an animated texture on to it.

[TehDave]

Well it doesn't seem like it's possible to do an animated texture just through BGSMs sadly, at least from what I found. That means animated rain drops are right out at this point. So it seems the best I can do is add a static water droplets texture to the wetness BGSMs but that probably won't look good for all surfaces.

[TwilightOne]

Also, if you add such a thing, wouldn't it also animate interior obects that are supposed to be sheltered? It's already weird to see everything wet in a concrete bunker when rain is occluded, so actually seeing water drips moving on those same objects would be distracting, I think.