Using one object to displace another?

Support Modeling
1

I’ve got a scene I’m working on:

SnowField4.jpg2300×1150 342 KB


One of the (many) reasons it doesn’t look realistic is that the snow looks the same by the base of the trees as it does anywhere else. Is there a way to use the locations of the trees (which are distributed with a particle system) to displace the plane? I sorta think not, seeing as how I’ve never heard of it, but I thought it might be worth an ask. If not, is there another efficient way to do the same sort of thing? I could manually sculpt, but that just doesn’t seem like the best possible way to do this. Thanks in advance!

DarkCrescent

2

You could bake an AO map on the snow. The trees should show up as black spots on it with a bit of darkening around them. You can then take that map into photoshop, edit it into something appropriate and use it with a displacement modifier.

3

Okay, thanks.