snow on trees?..

[ton]

I just can't resist this....

http://www.terranuts.com/photopost/showphoto.php?photo=24593

Makes your mouth water?

I know it's probably not what you're looking for, but it's not bad is it?

Ha, that's EASY! 












Nice work!! 

[Matt]

edit: So I just gave that another try.. still my geomerty explodes (like the still some posts above)...  (the input from the default shader has Compute Terrain attached)

You should not connect the Compute Terrain to any of the shaders on your tree object.

Matt

[Oshyan]

As Matt said I was somewhat misled as to the source of what made my setup work. Connecting Compute Terrain anywhere isn't necessary. It's the "Use Y for Slope" setting that did the trick in my case. So disconnect the Compute Terrain and see if you have more luck. It may not be hurting, but it seems it can't be helping.

- Oshyan

[ton]

As Matt said I was somewhat misled as to the source of what made my setup work. Connecting Compute Terrain anywhere isn't necessary. It's the "Use Y for Slope" setting that did the trick in my case. So disconnect the Compute Terrain and see if you have more luck. It may not be hurting, but it seems it can't be helping.

- Oshyan

Aight, looks like it has to do something with scale... I need to set very, very small scales on alt. limits... to get a result, and even then it's very hard to make a nice transition..
just curious Oshyan, in your setup, are you able to create a 'hard' line between solid white trees and green trees?

Thanks, Ton.

[Oshyan]

I didn't try to create a hard line, but I imagine it could be done by reducing the Fuzzy zone for your altitude constraint and/or reducing Fuzzy Zone Softness in the Tweaks tab.

- Oshyan

[sjefen]

Will there be tools for making deep snow hanging on the trees in the final version? It would be nice since we often use snow in our scenes.
http://www.ilankelman.org/weather/trees2.jpg

[Oshyan]

That's something that should really be handled in your modeling and texturing program for objects. Applying procedural displacement to objects in a smooth, realistic way is rather difficult.

- Oshyan

[sjefen]

Thank you Oshyan.
I understand. I was just hoping for something that will allow us to add a surface layer on top of for example the leaf shader

[Oshyan]

You can already add a Surface Layer on top of a leaf texture (Default Shader or Image Map Shader) that feeds into a multi-shader for object texturing. With appropriate settings you could get decent results, but the displacement necessary to achieve a real look of "piled-up" snow would be difficult if not impossible. So the texturing (color) could be done in TG2, but the modeling of actual snow build-up should be done in your modeling program.

- Oshyan

[WAS]

Sorry to bump such a old thread, but I am curious how to get this to work. I was able to add a nice snow shader to a single object, which looks rather nice, and had a nice smooth pileup. However, when I move the same method over to a population, it does not appear to work. Do I have to go in 'further' and apply to my needle shader rather then the outer shader like I did with the single object as apposed to this population?

Also, I am a bit confused on how the direction for height control were setup. For me, on a single object you can apply a limit height of '20' with a fade of 10, for a nice look, however on the population, the 'error' persists over the whole population as if there is no height control. (or I just broke the shader)

I am running the demo, could that be a issue? 

[Oshyan]

Running the free version won't cause any problems. You should setup things inside the Populator exactly the same as you would for a single object, i.e. go into the Needle shader *of the object inside the populator*, if that's where you want the snow to appear.

I'm not sure but the issues you're encountering may end up being Object Space vs. World Space coordinate differences. In which case feed your snow shader(s) through a Transform Input Shader with the "Use World Space" checkbox enabled.

- Oshyan

[masonspappy]

I've been playing with snowy trees for a bit. in the attached snippet, I've managed to achieve (what I think is) an acceptable representation of accumulated snow on bare tree limbs (the single tree at right foreground)  that can stand up to moderately close scrutiny.  But getting to this point meant figuring out a process in Blender then importing the results into Terragen.  Problem is that this process works best on deciduous trees but not very well on evergreen models.  I'm working on a separate snow process for evergreens but the results leave something to be desired (as you can also see in the picture).  I've about decided that the only way I'll ever get realistic snow on Evergreens is to rebuild the xFrog models, or make my own models from scratch using xFrog or Blender.  Only reason I keep pursuing it because there might be some $$$ involved if I can get it right.

[zaxxon]

These look very promising to me. I've been working on some snow laden trees as well, and  I like your snow on the bare trees very much!

[Dune]

It looks very good at this resolution, but you'd have to prepare every tree and import the meshes in TG. I tried to make some blobs of snow (meshes) on trees, but it's a lot of work. I was just thinking if a clever use of the mesh displacer would be useful here, just displacing (and coloring) the lesser slopes up. That way every tree could be snow-covered within TG.

[WAS]

I've been playing with snowy trees for a bit. in the attached snippet, I've managed to achieve (what I think is) an acceptable representation of accumulated snow on bare tree limbs (the single tree at right foreground)  that can stand up to moderately close scrutiny.  But getting to this point meant figuring out a process in Blender then importing the results into Terragen.  Problem is that this process works best on deciduous trees but not very well on evergreen models.  I'm working on a separate snow process for evergreens but the results leave something to be desired (as you can also see in the picture).  I've about decided that the only way I'll ever get realistic snow on Evergreens is to rebuild the xFrog models, or make my own models from scratch using xFrog or Blender.  Only reason I keep pursuing it because there might be some $$$ involved if I can get it right.

Amazing look though all and all. The snow looks like a couple days of melt when it starts bundling up on certain spots. Also, nice Jethro Tull avatar.

This is about the quality I can achieve on a single tree, when I do the same method on a population. It gets a bit blotchy and dusty.


Above without slope constraints... oops


Above with slope constraints at 45 degrees max.

Not exactly like I'd want it to turn out.