Winter Storm

[ares2101]

I'm seeing some small flakes between the camera and the ground features but I'd expect to see more.[SNIP]

Thanks, a quick render seems to do the trick.  I'll do a full render in the morning and post when it's done.

[Matt]

Upped the brightness on the lightning somewhat and added a local cloud on top of the camera to put snow in the foreground.  The latter seems to have done the trick, but even at very high brightness, I could never get shadows from the lightning.  In hindsight I suppose that's the be expected, the snow and overcast clouds are just scattering and reflecting too much light and the lightning is too far.  I think I may be satisfied with this.

It may be because the lights are in the cloud, blocking the light from reaching the ground directly, and only reaching it via Global Illumination.

Perhaps additional lights are needed below the cloud.

Matt

[AndyWelder]

I found out while trying dandelO's recipe for falling snow that best results are achieved with a cloud layer that has a low quality value: I got them all over place only with a value of 0.18 or less. Also the snow flakes tend to disappear with higher render quality settings: AA of seven made them almost invisible.

[dandelO]

And usually better results for this without RTA enabled.

[ares2101]

Took some of the above advice about render settings and came up with this.  It's not perfect, but I'm 90% sure I'm going to leave it like this.  I've spent a long time on this one and I do like how it's looking.

[Dune]

If you do want to improve, I'd add a (bluish) sun (maybe even 2) which doesn't throw shadows from atmosphere, about where the lightning is. You could make the trees throw shadows, and it would lighten up the snow.

[ares2101]

If you do want to improve, I'd add a (bluish) sun (maybe even 2) which doesn't throw shadows from atmosphere, about where the lightning is. You could make the trees throw shadows, and it would lighten up the snow.

I get either nothing special or some weird artifacts in the snow when I try this.  I'm going to call this render the final.  I like how it looks and it fits the bill for what my brother-in-law was looking for when he asked if I could do something like this.

Thanks for all the help, it was very useful for this and, I imagine, future images.