how to make a winter image

V-Ray V-Ray Common Gallery
1

hi, i did this rendering of a hotel project last mounth. now they asked for a winterversion of it. i never did something like that. has someone experience with snow on buildings and trees, etc… i can imagine the efford to put organic snowaccumulation on all of this little details of the building is an enormous efford, and wount think of how i will handle the bushes and trees with snow on them.
thx

2

You could use the snowmaker script: http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/snowmaker
It creates pretty nice snow geometry.

3

Would be interested to see the results if you do use that script :slight_smile:

4

thanks for the tip mirko. will post the result, if i can take the responsibility:roll:

5

Snow

A good shader for snow and tree with no leaves give a good result, here s a little exemple i ve done lately on a little project.


6

the snowmaker script works fine, the only problem i have is that i can only produce snow with a maximim height about 3-4cm. coverage, thickness have no influence on my snowfields. with bump etc i can make the snow more - bumped, but not higher. is there a way to get stronger snowcoverage?

nice image krono. would you mind sharing you snowshader settings?

7

Mainly it s a falloff in the diffuse from white to blue, and a mix of 2 mask in the bump, mask with a smoke, map with a cellular, one is set bigger then the second so you get big and small clump in the snow. I ll try to post setting if you need more info.

8

I did this image last month, I didn’t have to worry about snow on the roof of buildings as I couldnt really see the roof but on the floor I used 2 planes with textures applied to them, one with quite a harsh displacement that went a long way under ground so it looked like it faded out.

Also rendered a dirt map at the end to give the bumps and hollows more depth, didn’t use a script just hard work but got to admit your scene looks like a lot more effort.

http://img84.imageshack.us/img84/3203/080124maratexexternalsnma0.jpg

9

nice image aflack, without your explanation i would believe the snow is done in post, good work.

thanks for the advice krono, had to finish this morning and so used a snowmaterial from vraymaterials.de. will give your suggestions a try.

couldn`t handle it to get higher snowaccumulation with the snowmakerscript, so it took the noise and the mesh smooth from the script and used it on chamferboxes.
c+c welcome.

10

@Max Montana

I think that your trick whit the chamferboxes looks great! The only place where it breaks the illusion of snow are on the 2 tall center bushes. The corners facing the camera looks like boxes.

You need to adjust the snow color on the Pines to fit the the rest of the image.

…are the people on the left a little too small?

Preisler

11

Looks good.

12

you`re right preisler, the chamferboxes are ok on the roofs, but on the hedges they don`t look realistic - and on the flower boxes the look like white sausage.:frowning:
didn`t have more time to play around with them…

13

Looks good but I can’t help but feel your image needs a bit more contrast the shadows seem quite bright.

Snow looks good though

14

yor´re right aflack, did more contrast + darkening of the shadowareas in ps.

now the problem with too bright areas under the roofs (red arrow) is more visible. what can i try to handle this in vray?

as i generally do a lot of post in photoshop, with scanline renderer i rendered a shadow render element, and used this mask to tweak the shadows in ps. in vray i still face the problem that i can´t handle it to render masks for all shaded areas. with - vray shadows, vray raw shadows + vray matte shadow- render elements i only get shadows on objects witch are thrown from another object, but not the shaded areas of the object itself.
http://www.chaosgroup.com/forums/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=41973
has anyone a solution for this, would help me a lot.

15

this is caused by a typing error, find this line

on sp_thicjness changed val do (thickness = sp_thickness.value)

and change it to

on sp_thickness changed val do (thickness = sp_thickness.value)

great script!

16

I tried something like this one time and I found another good way of doing it. With the vrayextratex element, give it a composite map with:
-falloff map in the Z (snow on tops)
-falloff map set to shadow/light, tweak so it just gets the shadows, set it to multiply, ~70%

Additionally, have a GlobalIllumination element, and in photoshop, stick that at the top, and ues the result of the extratex to mask it out.

17

Looks good, but I’d try and bring some more blue into the shadows. Since snow is white it picks up the illumination from the sky very well. Take a look at these images:

640×480 59 KB

Also, you have some alpha problem with your tree on the left (clearly visible in the not-so-blue-shadow =)