drifting snow over land and small hillocks ?

[stevesideas]

Does anyone know of a good method to achieve this kind of result. I see it a lot in games and I wonder how they achieve it...is it just simple particles ? How would I achieve this on fairly large landscapes where a character walks across it ? I tried just using a optimised version of the land situated slightly above it and then animating the offset but it really doesn't look great. Any ideas ?

[super gnu]

some example images would help!

[stevesideas]

Similar to this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ke2zJK_g8E0

&

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T31CHzxjd4s

[joconnell]

Fume and krakatoa really - you could also try quite faint dumb facing particles with some noise maps and a gradient ramp in the opacity - neil blevins has a script called smoke this in his script pack that'd make a simple smoke stack particle system, steal the material from this and you'd get the look.

[stevesideas]

Thanks. I'll have a look at the Neil Blevins scripts and dumb particles.

[Raven]

I remember doing a setup for this effect years ago using Fume, so I think Phoenix could achieve it.
If I get a chance later I'll try make a setup.

[stevesideas]

I do have phoenix but I was thinking that over a large landscape this would be a massive simulation and take forever to calc and render. It would be great to see your scene though. Thanks a lot !

[Raven]

Here is a quick test I did this morning.

Luckily as it doesn't need minute details you can have a really large cell size so the sim is more manageable.
You can also add pflow particles and use the PhoenixFD operator to control them as well.
Obviously you can set turbulence, vorticity to what you need.
I also have the timescale set lower so you can have stronger wind without the smoke blowing to fast.

I didn't spend much time on it, i hacked together the settings I could kind of remember, but hope it helps.
Another thing that helps is checking these youtube clips showing things like temp and buoyancy can affect the smoke, they are old but still help a lot.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...16EC31BE9E2F1D

[stevesideas]

Thanks Gavin. Really appreciated ! The mp4 looks very good. Exactly what I was looking for !