Hi guys, I need some help, I’m trying to recreate a scene similar to the one at the beginning of Sintel where the camera flys through some snowy mountains. I’m having some trouble getting my snow to look right, the shadows in particular are to harsh. I’ve tried everything I can think of, from a plethora of extremely soft lights to AO to separating the shadow pass entirely. The image bellow illustrates how extremely soft the shadows are in the scene. Also the material has a very unique look its unlike any snow I’ve seen it has a sort of powdery look that I’m also having trouble recreating. I would really appreciate your help as soon as possible as this is for a piece for work that needs to be finished soon. Thanks in advance!!
Cole, you may have asked too broad of a question. What materials have you tried for snow? Can you post a blend or screenshot of what you have so far?
Sure sorry if I wasn’t to specific enough heres a shot of what I’ve got so far
I guess I’m having Problems making it look very soft and powdery. Thanks
Ahhh, you may be being too harsh of a critic on your own work! Looks pretty good to me. 
Many people try to achieve too much with just one render, just one effect. As far as the basic snow material goes, I think you have achieved it. Looking back at the Durian render, it’s the edges that look soft, where the rock patches show through. You can see some fine snow clinging to the rock. To achieve this precise style, you would need to unwrap your model, and hand paint the rock patches. There are several techniques to do this. I prefer painting with textures in Gimp or PS.
Now what do you want to do exactly, are you looking to expose patches of rock, like the durian shot?
[ATTACH=CONFIG]121628[/ATTACH]well did you look at blenderguru tut on snow
it gives a certain texture to get this snow look your looking may be!
have a look
look close in the pic for snow you’ll see a texture !
salutations happy 2.5
Thanks guys I appreciate the feedback, your right I can be a little overly critical sometimes. To achieve the rocks I was thinking I could unwrap and then texture paint a black and white map of where I want the rocks to be and use that as a stencil for the rock texture, and possible refine it in photoshop to create the faded edges.
edit: Ok I finished the alpha and it looks pretty good! I have another question though its a little unrelated but I dont really want to start another thread in a different section. If you watch the first sequence in Sintel theres snow blowing from right to left and I was wondering if their was a good way of creating that without a million particles? Thanks for the help!
Alpha textures on several layers of planes will provide a nice effect. Remember that all the layers of effects need not be either rendered together, or even created in Blender…
See attached blend, quick mockup oof how I would handle it. You will have to render to see it blow.
Attachments
blowing-snow.blend (605 KB)
Thanks I think that will work well! Ok another question for you I’m having problems unwrapping my mountains I cant seam to create an even UV map, which is causing allot of distortion with both my alpha map and rock texture. I would have attached the .blend but it was to large so I attached a screenshot of the model hopefully you can advise me as to how you would go about unwrapping it. Thanks!
You are probably going to have to seperate it into pieces. Thing is with a landscape this large, the required texture map would need to prolly hit 16k to accomadate it. So you need to fake it. Find places that protrude, seperate them then shove em back through the mesh, I know this might sound wrong and it is not a clear answer. But CG is all about trickery and refining the shot. Is every piece of this landscape going to be seen? Probably not. Figure out your shot angles, what will be seen and what won’t. Then you can plan your seams and find where you can seperate the mesh. Could you get this entire landscape looking good? Yes. But you only need to worry about what is on-screen.