Snowy

[bobbystahr]

This thread stuck with me, enough so that I revived a project from last year.
Last year I figured out a technique  (using xFrog and Blender) to create snow accumulations on branches of deciduous trees (Tree 1 and Tree 2 in attachment) .  I thought they looked ok.
Then used same technique on branches of xfrog models of evergreen trees (Tree 3 and 4. Might be best to pretend you don't see # 3. It kinda sucks     )
Tree #5 is the same .OBJ model as #4, but uses an xFrog-only technique for accumulating snow on branches.  I think it looks decent but the drawback is that the polygon count is nearly 2.5 time greated than the xFrog/Blender version. Need to retract that last sentence. Apparently my test model still used the full size TIFF files that came with xFrog model. I substituted smaller JPEG files and size dropped to roughly on par with other model.
To Ulco's earlier points, issues of shininess and bumpiness still need to be worked out but I think that's doable. 
Problem with all these techniques of putting Snow on evergreens is that, in reality,  snow will clump and thicken toward the end of the branch, and clumps will vaguely take the shape of the underlaying mass of needles.  This affect seems very difficult to achieve in xFrog because the technique I'm using only works with 3D geometry.  Pine Needles & Boughs  are created using images on flat planes which can't be displaced.  (I'm assuming same is true in Speedtree as well).  If anyone has any ideas I would love to hear them.     

I got some hi poly Pine bushes from Walli that use only colour maps and are 3d geometry and he builds for XFROG so maybe he knows if there are trees as well.

[masonspappy]

1 and 4 look pretty interesting. I didn't know XFrog had that snow adding possibility. So how did you make #4? Is that the Blender extra?

xFrog has something called a 'REVO' object that can be manipulated to produce a kinda/sorta snowy effect (mimicking snow accumulating on branch, not just coloring the plane white).  Problem is that it doesn't work for all trees.
In my image, .OBJ for trees 1 and 4  were imported into Blender , and you have to rotate the camera until they are viewed from the top.  Go into edit mode and select branches in a random, scattered mode (works well for me because I am also random and scattered.    then switch to a sideways view and and move the cursor up a bit. This has the effect of expanding all the selected parts upward. At this point it's starting to look a bit like accumulating snow. Then view the tree again from the top down.   Import a snow texture graphic (can be any kind of snow texture) and use Blender function 'Unwrap/ Project From view'   The selected geometries will be superimposed over the snow graphic and the tree should now have accumulated snow on the branches.
Works pretty well for deciduous trees, and so-so for conifers.   On the downside, the resulting files are !Yuge!.  (Still working on that).   But the tree will appear to have accumulations of snow and the branches will be visible from the underside.

[Dune]

Thanks for explaining. I don't use Blender, but there are other ways of course.