19 Sep

Tree with defined face or not?

 

Read some tutorials on building a snow shader:

Tutorail1

http://www.cgarena.com/freestuff/tutorials/maya/snow/snow.html

In the above tutorial the original polygon model is duplicated and water particle system is applied to model to emit snow like particles. The particles are then converted into polygons and particle system is deleted. Author uses mental ray render engine, and uses ray traced shadows. He uses indeirect light and final gathering. The author also states that this technique would probably work just as well with the use of ambient occlusion /bent normals instead of final gather in situations where complex light and movement causes final gather to flicker or misbehave.

Tutorial2

http://www.creativecrash.com/tutorials/realistic-snow

Here the author creates snow by

Creating a Blinn material, with deep blue ambient color to simulate the slightly bluish color of snow in sunlight and a slight bump using turbulence. He then creates a 2d fractal texture to simulate flittering ice crystals; the time phase of which is linked to the camera.  He remaps th fractal texture with a ramp to get stronger highlights. The output of this texture is placed in the specular rollout of the blinn shader. The snow glitter changes with camera movement.

Tutorial 3

Half n hour of how the author created an entire snow scene

4.
This site lists the parametres one could use for creating ice and snow.
http://www.evermotion.org/tutorials/show/7921/natural-shaders-one-zero-for-3ds-max-by-rebelthink-

5. http://jeffpatton.cgsociety.org/blog/archive/2007/2/