I recently was using Bryce 5, which for those that aren’t aware is mainly a landscape maker/ renderer, and I was doing alot of snow scenes, and realised that textured snow just doesn’t suffice. And yes, this is a Blender question
Okay, so I’ve got my terrain, now I want it to be covered in snow as if its snowed recently (snow thats been there for a long time looks different to new snow), and so I’ve been trying to do this with a mesh in the shape I want built on top of the terrain, and then texturing it like snow, but I’m not happy with how it looks.
Real snow looks soft and fluffy, almost volumetric I guess. I should imagine particles would be out of the question, as the snow will cover the entire terrain, and so there would simply be to many and it would probably lock up my computer after 10 minutes of rendering. Also, I wouldn’t really now how to do this to begin with, or if its even possible.
Also, there are objects in the snow, for example there is a soldiers helmet lying on the ground, half filled with snow, and half under the snow. The snow is sort of raised as it goes over the rim of the outside of the helmet.
Use a particle emitter for the falling snow (or emitters) and a build effect on a few meshes to build the fallen snow. That way you can have areas in the scene that don’t build (rocks etc) and shape the build mesh around the helmet.
use build? Lets see if I’ve got this right- If I have a rock and I want it to slowly get covered with snow, I would duplicate the rock, delete the areas where snow wouldn’t go (which would probably be the whole bottom half) and then sub-divide whats left, and then use the build to add the faces gradually? Hmm, thats a cool idea, I never thought of using the build function like that… I have another idea for doing the snow filling areas up.
Make the snow on top of the rock and then separate it. Scale it down so that its hidden inside the rock, and then make an animation where it scales up, and it will appear as if snows pilling up on the rock.
But my problem is getting the snow to look right, it seems to look out of place if I just have it textured… I’m trying to get the sort of snow like from a scene in Panzer Dragoon: Orta, or a render I saw from Starcraft, I’ll see if I can find a picture.
Okay, I couldn’t find the picture that demonstrates what I’m trying to do perfectly, but I did find a picture from the scene from Panzer Dragoon Orta thats just before…
http://www.panzerdragoon.net/screenshots/pdo_screenshot_38.jpg
Just after that Orta (the girl) gets up and all that whiteness is reduced- its only there to give the feeling of dizzyness after just falling from a great height, but afterwards you can see everything clearly, and you can see what I mean by the snow. You can kinda see it in that screenshot…
you could just duplicate the terrain and then fracal subdivide it and smooth it out. Then put a bit of subsurf on it. This would give the slightly randomised look. If you need to see the snow building up, you could use RVKs.
for teh slightly raised areas round objects, you would have to do those manually, maybe using proportional vertex editing.
For still images you could apply the technique used to make volumetric clouds.
Meaning, make 2 or 3 copies of your terrain (for snow this should be enough) an give them a minimal z-offset to the original terrain.
As material for the copies use one Alpha=0 and zTrans with a cloud texture; NoiseSize close to 0 or even 0. Use the cloud texture to determine the Alpha value. Slightly differnt settings for the copies should make it more vivid.
Additionally, you could use a blend sphere texture (zzz, Nor coordinates, Alpha on, sub mode) to “blur” the edges.
This should render much faster then particles but could need some time to tweak the settings.
In priciple this should work for snow covered stones etc. too.
