A light dusting
The main goal of this project was a little bit of practice in efficiently instancing trees and foliage, focusing on techniques to make the distribution realistic as well as being able to process and render thousands of objects with a minimal impact on processing and render times.
The second goal was to develop a technique for creating realistic snow on the ground focusing on shape and material characteristics.
For the snow, I experimented with a few different modeling techniques such as using VOPS with multiple noise operators as well as the sculpting and mountain tools but eventually found that a heavily modified dune setup using the terrain tools gave me the best result. The basic idea is by creating some very tall harsh dunes, converting the geometry into polygons from voxels and then scaling it down heavily in the Y axis you get a result that looked accurate to what I was aiming for. Alternatively (rather than using high resolution geo) you could export the height data to COPS and create an image to be used as a displacement map but as there is not a lot of heavy geometry elsewhere in the scene I could afford to just go the actual geometry route.
I used the scatter function within the terrain tools to add points along the landscape on which to instance my trees. By masking out areas using a noise function I was able to easily create gaps in the trees for the camera to fly through as well as create variation in their distribution. I use a plugin called MOPS to randomise the scale and orientation of each point that the trees are ultimately instanced on to. You can easily do this with a bit of code in a wrangle but MOPS just speeds up the process and gives you the ability to quickly dial in settings.
Using a small library of similar types of trees I randomly scattered them onto my instance points and once I found a variation I liked it stuck with it.
For the snow shader I looked at a few references of snow, mainly on the reflections and how it behaves with light and created something that looked pretty accurate for the scale and style of the scene. In the future I’m going to do a little project where there is snow very close to the camera so you can really scrutinize it.
I have made some changes to the scene where there is a bit of a blizzard driven by particles which adds another dimension to the shot. I just have to render it!
As always, a tidy scene file, is a happy scene file!