How to make frosty/snowy trees?

Support Materials and Textures
1

I am trying to make a winter scene with frostcovered trees, something like my reference photo from here:

reference.jpg800×600 213 KB

It is not like pure frost, more like snow attached to trees, but not like lumps of snow covering the branches.

I started the project by making a simple scene to experiment with suitable trees.
I made the trees with sapling addon and converted them to meshes.

My snow material is basically diffuse and glossy white with 0.6 roughness mixed 2:7.

My first try:


I weight painted the tips and most of the branches and they are now assigned as snow material and the unweightpainted material are bark, diffuse brown.

So that didn’t look good at all, so I added a hair-particle system to the branches, with small snow-material balls.


That doesn’t neither look good, not to mention that with a couple of trees with this system I got really heavy memory issues and trouble rendering at all. When I get to do the real scene, I think I will need even much more trees.

Any suggestions how I could do the task?

2

Try to select the tree faces from the top view. Duplicate the selected faces, extract them and give the new object a thickness and a subsurface modifier. Should work. Just a suggestion.

3

Take a look at this:

4

Thanks Taros for your contribution!

It seems to do the trick, I just need to get my snow material better and do some more tweaking.

snowtrees.png960×540 626 KB

Seems to be quite friendly solution to memory management, too.

Thanks also to moony, but I think I can’t use those techniques in my project.

5

You are welcome. Looks good so far.