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Share via E-mailIn the tutorial you will learn how to create:
- A realistic snow material
- Snow tire tracks
- Footprints in the snow
- Icicles
- A snow roof texture
Welcome to week 2 of the Weather special 
Last week we covered how to create puddles, but this week things are getting a little bit chillier… snow.
Being from Australia, I must admit that snow has never been my strong point. The most contact I’ve had with snow was from ski holiday in New Zealand about five years ago, but those memories are getting pretty vague let me tell you! So for this subject I’ve had to rely entirely on reference photos. Hopefully the result will please those of you in colder climates! 
I’ve experimented with various methods for making the snow clump together naturally and glisten in the sunlight, and this is my workable solution.
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- Winter War by Antti
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Lets try that again…
http://i287.photobucket.com/albums/ll151/asmithey/X-Mas%20Cards/6x9_Standard_front_Update.jpg
Hi Andrew!
Can I use these blender models in a game? Me and my friends would want to have some of them in this game:
http://www.landwirtschafts-simulator.de/
Please reply.
Tepa00
@ Tepa00:
The polycount is most likely way too high for a game. Most games use simple, low poly landscapes and rely on specular, normal, and other maps to add extra detail, instead of actual polygons.
Could someone give me the link to the tire tracks texture? I can’t find any good ones
I think this is what andrew used.
http://www.cgtextures.com/login.php?&texid=30295&destination=texview.php?id=30295&PHPSESSID=n67caliq2lev69uut17srdivf2
This one might not be prefect but it may work for you.
http://www.imageafter.com/image.php?image=b17eva403.jpg
Thats pretty cool, I may hav to do this after christmas. In the finished render it looks liek you also added a little big of vector blur (I think that’s what it is)
@ Gungir:
Well, it might be little big, but the game itself has really high polycount and over 80% of the buildings and mods have even more polys! There’s even a shed that has every single plank made and each is subdivided at least 3 times in the z axis…
So I am currently figuring out how to make the back and side wall.
Reg. Tepa00
hy,
There was a contest on blendercookie to make a snowman,
and in my work your tutorial helped a lot, thanks andrew for the great tutorials!
http://blendermoments.blogspot.com/2010/12/hoember-rajzolos-versenyre-keszult-kep.html
Hello,
The tutorial looks great, Im new in blender, when I open your first scene, I do not get the backgroud image as the ref is on your hard drive, so I guess blender cannot find it, do you know how to fix that ?
and on the step of saving the painted snow car trace, (around 8:00l mn in the video), blender crashed everytime, so I couldt continue, any idea how I can get around that ?
tks I would love to go through your tutorial the whole way.
Serge
Not to be “That Guy” or anything, but…
IOR = Index of Refraction. Definitely good to know what it is so you can make more realistic materials. Here are a few lists of the IORs for some materials:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_refractive_indices
http://refractiveindex.info
Yes, I live in a colder climate than you (in winter at least) and it does look quite realistic.
Great Tutorial, Thanks Andrew!
Looks great! 2 crits/heads-ups for future users of this tutorial: snowflakes are hexagonal, not pentagonal. and no car currently in this world is capable of turning like that. But this scene looks pretty epic.
@tepa00, with that many polys, how well do you expect your game to run?
Hi andrew,
This might be a bit extreme, but can you show me how to create ball lightning, and if possible, for blender 2.49b and 2.5. Thanks
Thankyou for the time you have dedicated to blender tutorials. Without you, blender would’ve been a worst nightmare to use. Thanks
could i use a movie in the texture that i use for the displacement modifier?
@ The Hammer:
Yes, you can (I think, I’ve never tried it). You could also use Dynamic Paint
great snow from downunder ! LOL
Thank you very much for this. I’m not a blender user, but I did adapt your tips, gradients, texture use, scattering etc. for photoshop.
Very useful. As a fellow Australian, I learnt a lot about snow with this.
You had mentioned, for added realism, to add snow on objects other objects in the scene. I was wondering what would be the most effective way of doing that. I have tried just modeling piles, with the snow texture and using a displacement texture as well, but it didn’t come out looking very realistic.
I thought about using particles and collision settings, but wasn’t sure that would create the desired effect.
PLEASE HELP!!!….lol
Thanks.
By the way, you are too freaking awesome!!!
Hi!
I really like blender and I was wondering how if someone can make a video on how to create a sandstorm.
@aaron If I where to make a sandstorm, I would just make plane that emmits particles (not rendering plane) and have it emit them sideways. If that didn’t look that great, just make a group with different color of small tan specks and make it emit the group randomaly
I’m catching up! More comments peoples! hehe
http://jeremydeighan.wordpress.com/2011/05/17/let-it-snow/
Jeremy Deighan
dude! you rock, thanks for all the tutorials.
Любимое кино на твое мнение ?
Пользователи форума http://www.blenderguru.com поделитесь
Мой – Унесённые призраками
Just curious, have u seen ‘real’ snow or did you pick up on the reflections in the snow by looking at a picture?
First, all Tut´s are the best what i have see for Blender…
THANK U sooo much Andrew….
I use Blender ca 2 Month… all new for me
sry my English…. im German
Here is my Result :
http://img194.imageshack.us/img194/3876/winterlandschaft.png
You are very good! This must be the best blender tutorial I have ever seen!
Thank You
Excellent with a few exceptions. 1 Cars or trucks don’t turn in right angles 2 The doors of sheds like that open out, moving the snow away from the doors 3 The foot prints don’t show the usual exit and entrance that happens when walking in snow. One would have to hop to make tracks like that…..
because there are now snow in Bali and now i make it with your tutorial.. thank for this tutorial..
because there are no snow in Bali and now i make it with your tutorial.. thank for this tutorial..
Hi Andrew,
Ive been blending for 2years now and i find you a huge inspiration. I follow you on FB and enjoy all your posts/tutorials. Here is the link to my website , there you will find 2 snow theme renders.
http://icblendz.com/?p=207
Today im going to try your underwater tutorial and hopefully enter your comp (i could use the Blender e-Shop win)
Thanks4everything
Where are the textures?
Instead of a clouds texture you can use the noise texture. Got the same results.
This is the link to the tire tracks texture Mr. Price used.
http://www.cgtextures.com/getfile.php/Ice0030_4_S.jpg?id=32169&s=s&PHPSESSID=o19ldvqpr2j8p8na7hk8lknn43
Thank you very much for this tutorial.
But I have 1 problem. When I make the grass, the color stay white (I think because of my snow material). In my scene I have created 2 materials : snow and grass. If I delete snow material, grass appears correctly but when both are active it doesn’t work. Someone can help me?
It’s ok. In “particule-render” I forget to change the number of my material.
Thx a lot for this tutorial
Andrew,
I had a hard time trying to just set up for this tutorial, I tried to create the barn and have not yet been successful. I created the barn with doors and roof and so on, but I was unable to make the siding on it. I tried to use an image for an alpha map and tile it as a geometry. The problem is that it did not do anything. I was able to add an additional texture with clouds and it was able to bump map the barn, but the tiled ramp was not. Maybe I made the ramp incorrectly but I do not know what I did to screw it up if I did it wrong. I used gimp to create a gradient ( black to white with the black on bottom) and saved it as a png. Do you have any thoughts? On another note how should we create the doors? just use a image with alpha?
In case anyone was wondering IOR stands for index of refraction. It’s physics term used to describe how light bends through objects of different densities.
here is my snow scene:
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=199847926760846&set=a.178860575526248.45913.132831550129151&type=1&ref=nf
I live in northern canada and i think you did a very good job of making snow
Unless it’s a fairly thin layer of snow on top of thick ice (which I have seen before) the footprints would be roughly the same depth as the tire tracks. People are lighter than vehicles, but it doesn’t take much weight to sink down to the ground.