William Faucher on EasyRain, a New Unreal Engine 5 Add-On

Could you please introduce yourself to those who still don't know you? What have you been up to since our previous interview all the way back in 2021?

Great to speak with you again! I'm William Faucher, born and raised in Canada and currently based in Norway. I've been working in the games and visual effects/film industries since 2009 and have been using Unreal Engine since I was in school, back in the Unreal Engine 3 and UDK days. Since then, I've made the switch to the film industry, and with the slow but inevitable convergence between games and film in terms of rendering quality, this is where I found my niche.

Back in 2020, I started a YouTube channel geared towards rendering tutorials for cinematics in Unreal Engine 4 for fun, with zero intention of it ever becoming a thing. I enjoyed using my background in games and the experience I had in film to help others bridge the gap between your typical offline renderer and Unreal Engine with, let's face it, its delightfully weird quirks.

Since then, the channel has grown and has become a large portion of my day-to-day work. I've been making more tutorials and consulting with studios, and lately, I've been focusing on building helpful tools for Unreal Engine on the Marketplace (now Fab): EasyFog, EasyMapper, EasySnow, and the brand new EasyRain that I released a week ago.

If you're familiar with EasySnow, you'll find that EasyRain works in the same way, as both are built on the same system and design philosophy. 

EasyRain is a new tool for Unreal Engine 5 that allows artists to create highly-realistic rain using a Blueprint system and harnessing Niagara particles. With it, you can create light rain, or stormy summer downpours in minutes. EasyRain is designed for both games/real-time and offline rendering for cinematics, and it runs well on lower-end GPUs.

When combined with the Movie Render Queue, Easy Rain renders beautiful, falling rain that motion-blurs in a realistic way. There’s also the ability to add curtains of fine sweeping rain to add some additional depth to your level, along with backlighting controls that scatter the ambient light through the raindrops the way refraction does in real life, which makes night-time scenes so much more convincing. If you’ve used EasySnow before, you will know exactly how EasyRain works as the two are based on the same system/design philosophy. Each raindrop has an animated texture that is based on real-world studies used by the Visual Effects industry.

There are lots of look development features to really control the look of your rain for a given scene, its color, opacity, motion scaling, backlighting/refraction, the amount of rain and splashes. I spent a lot of time giving users the most amount of control they can get to really nail the look of their shots.

Included with EasyRain are two Material Functions that you can connect to your master materials. The first adds puddles to your ground surfaces and is compatible with landscapes. The second adds fully animated rain droplets and/or leaks (toggleable within your material instance) to your surfaces to really make things look wet. Both of these are a nice little addition that really lends a lot of credibility to a rainy level.

The puddles material function is fully controlled by the EasyRain Blueprint, to make it easy to control the size, shape, and color of the puddles, and the wetness of surfaces, throughout the level. The droplets/leaks function is not controllable by the blueprint, but that is by design. For the most part, it is better to control it on a material instance basis.

You can find EasyRain on Fab, which is Epic's brand-new Marketplace for seamless integration into your projects.

Could you please tell us about setting up a Fab profile and how one should approach this task? From your point of view as an already well-established creator, how easy was it to share your Easy Tools on the new platform? What were the challenges?

This is one of the many things the team at Fab really nailed down. Migration from the original Marketplace was smooth as butter. For my sake, there were no issues whatsoever. You selected the products you wanted to migrate over from the original marketplace, hit next, and you were done. We had the option to upload new screenshots/promo material, and the rest is history.

I have to give the Fab team credit for how quickly new submissions are processed. When submitting EasyRain, I got an answer within 4 hours with some minor things to fix/address. The final submission took no longer than 6 hours to get approved, on a Sunday, no less. It doesn't seem like the quality of the processing has dropped, but the pace at which they give sellers a heads-up has drastically improved.

For new creators looking to submit their own assets and tools, the process is simple. You'll be prompted on a page to choose what kind of asset you are submitting. Unreal Engine, Unity, animations for Maya, ZBrush files, audio, tutorials/courses, it is quite robust. Previously, I would have had to set up an account on ArtStation, Unreal Engine Marketplace, and Gumroad to do the same to achieve the same visibility, but now? Having it all in one place saves creators a lot of time while potentially expanding a potential target audience.

What would be your advice to those who are considering sharing their assets on Fab? What should they focus on? Would you recommend Fab as a marketplace for non-Unreal Engine users?

If you're a seller trying to get as much visibility as possible, go for it, publish your work on Fab. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain when Fab lives up to its potential. Making your assets available for Unreal Engine users, Unity, and other DCCs all in one convenient location is amazing and so convenient. If you are an aspiring creator/seller, I cannot stress enough how important it is to choose the type of asset you make wisely. There is an overabundance of easy-to-make assets and people looking to make a quick buck. If you are a seller who is concerned about your assets being copied or mimicked and sold, the solution to that is twofold:

1. Ensure you have a solid marketing strategy to promote your assets in a way no one else can copy. Even if two products are the same, the one with better marketing/looks more desirable will sell better. You're running a business, treat it like one.
2. Make assets or tools that cannot be copied easily. Try to think of a problem that needs to be solved and go from there. Do we really need more rock and pebble or barrel and crate asset packs? No. We really, really don't. A complex product that saves studios valuable production time? Now you're onto something.

William Faucher, VFX/CG Generalist

Interview conducted by Theodore McKenzie