Winter Storm

[ares2101]

Making this image gave me a lot of trouble, none of the methods for making snow within TG2 were turning out right for the scene.  In the end, I decided to try adding it with postwork in GIMP by adding some Noise, blurring it and then adjusting its transparency.  The lightning is Cyphr's.

Yay or nay?

[Axe]

It's a good start, but I would expect more intense light illuminating the scene from those two strikes.  The snow just looks like noise, perhaps some larger flakes, also lit by the lightning would help.

[ares2101]

OK, this is a new try using bla bla 2's snow method (http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=10691.0)

Thoughts?

[Henry Blewer]

This last render looks better. The snow made the first look noisy. Maybe some hard shadows and light from the lightning. It would be helpful to know how much illumination and the effect distance of lighting for a lightning bolt.

[Red Eyed Jedi]

Still can't help but think that the clouds would be brighter here - especially with two strikes of lightning - would a higher exposure in the camera settings help here?

[bla bla 2]

Merci, ares2101.  

Ca rend bien.

[ares2101]

Still can't help but think that the clouds would be brighter here - especially with two strikes of lightning - would a higher exposure in the camera settings help here?

Hm, you may be right, I'll try that later this week.

[ajcgi]

I would say a really bright sunlight towards the camera then under-expose. You're missing shadows. Actually maybe 2 bright lights, one for each strike?

[ares2101]

I would say a really bright sunlight towards the camera then under-expose. You're missing shadows. Actually maybe 2 bright lights, one for each strike?

I actually do have two light sources in the clouds.  I think I'll try increasing the brightness of the bolts.

Another thing I'm having trouble with is the snow cloud layer.  While I can tweak it to look really good up in the sky, it never seems to be at ground level, or at least, not anywhere near the camera.  Is there a way to change that?  Snow won't look right unless there's some in front of the trees in the scene.

[Dune]

You could try a local low cloud with a tiny sized PF...

[AndyWelder]

Maybe cranking up the value for "Enviro light" - "Strength on surfaces" to a value of 3 would do the trick.

[ares2101]

You could try a local low cloud with a tiny sized PF...

That seems to be doing the trick in my test renders, now I just need to get the lightning to look right.

[ares2101]

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.

[dandelO]

I'm seeing some small flakes between the camera and the ground features but I'd expect to see more. What I usually do is set my cloud layer to the same height as my camera and add whatever thickness is required for it to meet the ground. Next, I open the settings panel and its shader preview window(zoom in to a really close view) for the snow fractal, set all scales to 0.01 and then move to the colour tab. Colour contrast of 1 or 2 is good and then I lower the colour offset incrementally. You'll see the shader preview update and when it looks like it's a nice flat plane with the right coverage, I think it should be fine when applied to the snow layer, some minor adjustment is still usually needed but that's the basis of how I'd normally do it.

Try this clipfile, for a cloud layer with a density fractal like this shader preview image.
[attachimg=#]

Make the localised coordinates the same as your camera's coordinates and you can adjust the limits of the snow with the size of the localised cloud radius, you won't want it to go way into the distance since it's all around the camera anyway and that would just increase render time when you don't need to, usually, a small ball of snow round the camera gives a good, fast result.

[dandelO]

* Replace 'colour offset' from my above post with 'coverage', I forgot those settings were labelled a little differently in a cloud fractal, they do the same thing as a power fractal's settings in that tab, the only difference is that you can't choose colours, I do prefer power fractals.