Thanks everyone.
The water droplets work aswell by the way, Calico. You just can't use the TG2 sphere object for it as they appear in a ring when populated.
I tested this the same way with a tiny sphere object of my own and water shaders before making the snowflake .tgo. I thought that the raindrops required a deal of refraction and transparency to appear convincing, in my opinion (although, that's neither here, nor there), the fact is that
anything in object format can be given real depth of field(some motion blurring would be nice too...) as a floating population, there are only 8 'planes' of snow layered along 'Z' in this image via the terrain distribution and, I only rendered at 640x480, larger resolution and greater depth could be fantastic.
This could be really nice with a bit of thought and a little more work. I'm happy with my results so far at least. More to come hopefully...
Also, did you know?:
That the
default lake object can be used as a population source object...
So can the default
SUN! Alas, it suffers much the same as the sphere though. It populates as a ring of suns and appears at the elevation height of the original Sun, when sit on terrain is left checked. It also doesn't render, just like the sphere.
I had an inkling that the sun was an actual 'object' as opposed to a lightsource only, but I didn't test that until last night. Now if PS could enable these populations of spheres and suns etc. to be rendered properly...
Someone asked in here before: 'What is the output on lightsource nodes for?' Planetsides answer was, in a nutshell, 'Nothing, the output is for nothing and does nothing, other than to keep all the nodes in much the same format. I'd like to debate that answer, at least to prove me wrong and point me on the right tracks again, I know very little of the workings of these things but, I know I'd like to use them if I could, will PS be 'fixing' these object/sunlight issues so they are regular objects that respond correctly(and I use 'correctly' very liberaly here.
) to the numbers I type, Oshyan?
Now I realise, I have only tested this population idea with suns, not lightsource objects... I'll be back!
I love this program! It's like it was made just for me!