Snowy

[Hannes]

I found a nice tutorial about snow shaders here:

https://cgtricks.com/snow-shader-workflow-jarrod-hasenjager/

...and looked if I can translate this somehow to TG. In the end I only took the advice of adding an overall reflection (shader) with a specular roughness of 1. Subsurface scattering tested on a snowball didn't look good.
There is a subtle luminosity with a blueish tint, and I used a fake stones shader with a glass shader applied to it, which is masked by a PF for the sparkles. They work for animations too. At the moment I'm rendering a small one.
The path is made of warped simple shape shaders. I used the warper for the tracks and the bumps as well.


...I added some chromatic aberration, becaue I know Kadri loves it...

[luvsmuzik]

Will you be providing paper glasses with red and green cellophane lenses?

Beautiful!

[otakar]

Love love love it! Especially now, when the damn heat is starting again, oh how I miss the snow! It's been a terrible (dry) winter where I am.

Seriously, this is very well done, the reflections are perfect and the path is wonderful, too.

[bobbystahr]

WOW...if this isn't on the planetside site it certainly should be. I started shivering just looking at it heh heh. Well done and very inventive Hannes....

[bobbystahr]

for your animation maybe have a the front portion of a pair of skis at the frame bottom moving with the camera...just a thought

[Hannes]

Thanks guys! Bobby, it's only a very small camera movement just to show the sparkling. But a nice idea...

[mhaze]

Very clever and beautifully done.

[bobbystahr]

Thanks guys! Bobby, it's only a very small camera movement just to show the sparkling. But a nice idea...

heh heh... big thinker I am...

[Oshyan]

Indeed it is a very nice snow setup. Would you not get the same sparkles with a simple Reflective Shader rather than Glass?

- Oshyan

[WAS]

That is how I ended up achieving a good specular roughness on snow as well, though your approach to sparkles is interesting. Going to give this some  go. Curious about your snowball, how did it end up working/looking?

[Hannes]

Indeed it is a very nice snow setup. Would you not get the same sparkles with a simple Reflective Shader rather than Glass?

It's a setup I took from an older scene, so I forgot about that, but it doesn't render much faster with a reflective shader.

Curious about your snowball, how did it end up working/looking?

Unfortunately I didn't keep any render. Maybe I'll do some tests in the future...

[Kadri]

Very nice scene Hannes.
Just one small nitpicking.....


No it isn't the chromatic aberration 


Seriously i don't know why but the wide FOV looks kinda too much here to me.
I use wide FOV too actually sometimes depending on the scene.
Curious how much degree it is. Maybe it is just me probably.
Other then that i like this very much.
If the mountains had more trees it reminds me somehow where i lived in Germany.

[WAS]

No it isn't the chromatic aberration 

Seriously i don't know why but the wide FOV looks kinda too much here to me.
I use wide FOV too actually sometimes depending on the scene.
Curious how much degree it is. Maybe it is just me probably.
Other then that i like this very much.
If the mountains had more trees it reminds me somehow where i lived in Germany.

It kind of warps the bench of or perspective. Makes it look a bit odd.

Unfortunately I didn't keep any render. Maybe I'll do some tests in the future...

I've been working on my own iteration of the shader, trying to make it appear as volumetric as possible, seems to work decently, you can see the snow on the ground has much more "density" than a snowball with the same shader. Though the small scale displacement (not snow fleks) is a bit much when seen in repetiton. I've been trying to make it more subtle and more patchy but having trouble.

Also having issues with my snow boundaries mask. Either too smooth, or too hard, it just doesn't look right! Also, when I add a reflection layer for some water melt, it makes the bottom ground-to-snow colour blend waaay more than without (almost looks like muddy sloshy snow), which already has a bit of an issue looking natural.

[Dune]

A beauty again, Hannes. Perhaps the glass gives better sparkles than a reflective because it would sparkle on 'both' sides of a grain.

[Hannes]

Thanks again, guys!
Ulco, I did a short test, and it roughly looked the same. Rendertimes are the same, no matter if I use glass or reflective, so it's OK anyway.

Kadri, you're right. It started as a reworking of that scene:
https://planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,22518.msg230247.html#msg230247
...and I didn't change the camera settings. It's 120° FOV, so yes, quite wide angled . Now the animation is still rendering, but I'll probably do some renders with a lower FOV.

WASasquatch, I guess, the main thing, why the snowballs don't look like snowballs is the lack of subsurface scattering, and I don't mean the fake stuff I once made here. If you look at the shader examples in the link I posted at the beginning of this thread, the snowball started to look like a snowball after the subsurface scattering was applied. To my taste it looked like plaster before, no matter which displacement was used.
I think the snow on the ground looks good.