Snow

[Dune]

Well, it's that time of year again, leaves falling, wind howling, rain pouring down. Hopefully we'll be having some of that old-fashioned snow again this year.... you know, like before climate change. Speaking for my Dutch ground, of course.

[Hannes]

Fantastic!!!!! This looks incredibly realistic. I love the snow clumps. Although the second image is more or less a crop of the first (I think...), I almost prefer it. The lighting is so natural, and I can smell the air,

[DocCharly65]

You call them "snowtest", Ulco? I call them wonderful!

I love the overall ambience and especially the sparkling of the snow!

[Dune]

Thanks guys. Well, it started out as a simple test for a snow shader, hoping to include the sparks into the overall reflectivity (you know, some sort of combined soft/wide and narrow/small/hard roughness mask), but in the end I had to add extra reflections by tiny fake stones (used as mask) and distance.
And then I thought; let's add some stuff....
I like the crop as well, that was the original size of the whole thing.

Snow clumps I quite quickly made in ZBrush; just importing the shrub and Dynameshing the leaves, some pulling and inflating, remeshing, voila. I still need to do a test with subsurface methods, hoping to get it to work in SR.

[Kadri]

I love this Ulco.
It feels different from your other work as well. Probably because of the lighting-colour palette.

[Dune]

Thanks Kadri.

I added some of the sparks (with distance) to the snow clump objects, and also masked the opacity by a 1mm fractal. It gives sort of the illusion of transparency (see color adjusted and enlarged crop). Perhaps a tad too much, but at least it works. Doing this with a glass shader and SSS is a no-go for me; too slow.

[DocCharly65]

I needed a long and close look to thr cropped render to find out that the snow on the bushes has a bit too smooth surface. In the overall view of the complete picture it' not visible for me. Very good solution.

[Hannes]

I totally agree with Nils.

[mhaze]

Fantastic! pushing terragen to its limit again!

[Jo Kariboo]

Excellent !

[Dune]

Yes, the snow chunks were maybe a bit too quickly made, too smooth. I've found a nice ref.

[masonspappy]

Beautiful!

[Lady of the Lake]

Excellent.  No other words needed.

[Hannes]

How did you make these clumps? Are they populated onto objects. I guess not, since you can't populate on populations, right?

[Dune]

No, I just took the shrub(s) I wanted them for and dynameshed the leaves in ZBrush, and after some additional pushing and shoving and smoothing I exported again as snow-clumps, specific for that shrub. So when populating you have to use the exact same location, spaces, sizes and seed. The only thing I did, not to have them allover, was to add a world opacity mask (PF). though that wil no doubt also cut some object parts in half. As they're snowclumps that didn't bother me too much.