How to make Snow in Blender (Cycles)

good day and welcome to another blend Guru long format tutorial um it's been a while since I've done one of these long ones but people have been requesting it so here it is in this video you're going to learn how to make snow um realistic looking snow uh we did a tutorial about 3 years ago on snow but look looks pretty crap right it doesn't look that real so thought we'd have another crack at it so my team has been working on finding a new method for making snow which actually looks real it's actually hard to pull off like if you look like on CG forums and stuff like a lot of people have a go at snow but it generally just looks like sort of mushy paste on the ground or just way too smooth so anyways um gilm Henrik has been working with me and he made this fantastic image that you can see in front of you and um yeah we've uh we we've we've got it down to a method a method that you yourself uh can uh can create easily at home so we'll be sharing that uh in this video but essentially this tutorial is uh it's designed to be you know used across a whole variety of different scenes so it's it's supposed to look like the standard snow on the ground so whether you're making a street scene um a forest is there snow in Forest a field any sort of snow anything that's built up on the ground you can use this method for all of that um so it's a lot of fun once you figure it out it's like oh yeah this now I get it this is how it uh this is how snow looks um so we'll be talking all about that um I'll give you a quick overview of all the main points in the tutorial right now so we start with a plane in blender and then we paint out some uh you know the basic shape of the tie tracks just so we know then we open that up in uh Photoshop and this is where we're going to do most of the detailed painting so we start by uh replacing it with some detailed tie tracks then the uh track crevice which gives it that depth um then this raised surface area then some snow scufs uh let me zoom in there over the top of it and then finally some Footprints at the end so this is a grayscale black and white image which then we're going to put into uh blender to use as a displacement mask and so blender then uses this as the height map for the ground and that is where you get um all your detail uh in there then we're going to be using pro lighting Skies uh the add-on uh to create this uh outdoor lighting effect if you don't have the add-on you can just use a standard sunlamp um and then we're going to be getting into the uh whoops what is it doing then we're going to be getting into the material it looks fairly complex here but I I assure you it is very simple I mean this part here is just like a duplicate of the one underneath it anyway um so yeah just setting up some really basic thing trying to get that you know the little glittery effect across the surface and and um you know subsurface scattering and different things like that um and then finally at the end of it we'll be adding in uh some trees along the background there um to uh to finish it off so without further Ado let's go ahead and open up a new scene in blender first thing we're going to do is shock horror delete the default Cube and the default lamp and we're going to replace it with a plane and this is going to be our snow so scale it up to fit roughly the uh the grid floor however big you want your scene to be and uh oh and at this point by the way make sure you apply the scale by hitting control a scale otherwise that will cause very weird problems when you do the uh displacement and uh and other things so make sure you apply that scale and now we need to give it some geometry um and the reason for that is that displacements uh they need geometry to work and we've only got four vertices to play with so that would uh that would not be good so so I'm going to go and subdivide it a total of 65 times it sounds very specific and it is um it's well doesn't really matter all that much I I just found that you know roughly 4,000 faces which you can see in the top there this is uh it gives you enough sort of geometry to play with um you know you can add a Subs surf modifier which we will as well but you know just set to 65 all right gosh so now I'm going to start positioning the uh you know setting up the scene from the position of the camera so I'm going to go to the front hit Control Alt number pad zero and just position your camera wherever it is uh that you want it so uh yeah somewhere about here looks pretty good okay yeah this this this scene is going to be very uh very artistically pleasing cuz we're going to have uh Focus entirely on the tire tracks the most uh normal of scenes but we want to have a look at our tie track so I'm positioning the camera you know right about here now we need to do some painting some painting in blender now the reason of course we want to do the painting in blender is so that when we go to photoshop or or whatever it is you want to use um you actually know where it is that you're painting in relation to your scene okay if that doesn't make sense it it will soon okay so go ahead and split the view and go to UV image editor um now before we add an image to start painting we need to UV unwrap it so go tab or edit edit mode and hit U and then select unwrap um the easiest of all objects to unwrap a plane um at this point it's always a good idea just to check by the way uh just click this little button down there that little tiny one um and uh just to check that it's rotated the correct way and in this way you can see that it is um because yeah cuz sometimes what you do is you U unwrap it and you think like oh yeah it's perfect it's exactly the way I want it and then later on you find that wait a minute that's not perfect like that doesn't line up with the camera at all and it just it's annoying so that's why oh no hang on which way did I rotate it no wrong way I did this to show you how how yeah you don't want it to be okay all right so there we go now that it's perfect so I'm going to go ahead now and add a new image new image which is something you do when you want to do some painting and blender so I'm going to load this in here now the size of your image is important because the higher you know the bigger the size the more detail you can actually paint in when you do your displacements so I'm going to set the width and height of this to 496 or 1024 Times by 4 you didn't know that you could actually do math in the number Fields yeah I don't know if that's new to you I I I remind like I only just discovered it again like a year ago I'm like oh yeah you can do that thing you don't have to get the calculator out all right snow painting map is what we'll call it leave the color as black and hit okay and there we go so now if you want to paint onto this you would go into paint mode and you could just start painting but that's no good because you can't actually see it on your model which is the whole point of doing this so you can actually see where it's actually going to be uh you know when you do the painting right so what what you want to do is over here if you go to texture paint you would see a big purple plane here and now this could confuse you if you're used to an older version of blender cuz normally it bases whatever here is depending on what's in the UV image editor which uh but now now that we're using uh the brand uh well not brand new it's a few years we're using Cycles now um it's basing it on the active material node image texture all right so just split the view again here and to go to the node editor add a new material and then all you need to do here is ADD add an image texture and then click snow painting map the one that we just created and that's it you don't even have to connect it to anything you just have to have it physically selected which doesn't really make a lot of sense to me whatever we've selected it now when we paint over here look at that you can see it's over there and if you paint over here no uh okay so we want to do is we want to paint you know from the point of view of the camera you just want to go like where do you actually want the tire tracks so I would go like all right R about there and around about there but and this is a problem right is when you look at this you go like well that's you know well for one I mean the perspective is all wrong but let's just focus on the scale like how big are tire tracks in relation to the scene because it's good to have something of scale to base it off cuz otherwise you're going to start you know painting in things and it's like how wide should the tire tracks you know it's just everything is by ey and just in blend it's good to work with scale as best you can um so I find it's very helpful to add something of scale like a human being all right now obviously we're not going to model a human being I'm going to show you very quickly how to quickly add a human in blender if we just go to uh go to file user preferences and then just type in rigify rigify enable that uh that add on there and then if you go to the object mode go to amateure human there we go now that is the scale of a human so already I can see that I've actually made something wrong like the camera's too low like I actually want it to kind of be at human height you know or roughly human height so I don't know like there yeah okay so and we know that this is human height by the way if you go to the uh Hit N to bring up this you can see that he is 1.93 M tall um and you can check that you know that's true if you go to metric you can actually change the unin blender go to metric 1.93 M tall so the average size of a Dutchman I guess I don't know I'm 1.85 I think you know so it's a little tall I I really think that that was probably based off the average Dutchman which makes sense you know it's the blender Foundation that's where they're based so uh but anyways 1.93 yeah anyways that's that's the basically the whole point is I'm trying to say is this is this is is the size of a man okay so this is helpful because now when you go to paint when you go to paint it's like now I actually know how big the tire track should be like I think actually if I look like this is probably this isn't big enough like this brush size like how big is like your foot fits in a tire track like if it's on the road so I think if he's wearing shoes like it's at least that big maybe even a little bigger so this is this is why we're doing this exercise here is to check the scale of things and the you know the placement so I'm going to put one tie track here and one tie track here and I'm not going to paint from this view because as you saw before it like extrapolates it like it's a camera projection so now that that's there I'm just going to quickly draw out where I actually want my tie track to be um now you could make an interesting sort of whoop um or I don't know how should it be I Reon that's all right yeah yeah that's pretty good so just a basic shape of it like that all right um and I don't know if you really wanted to I suppose you could check like how big should a footprint be and go like that big right that that's the size that a footprint should be all right okay so now what we're going to do is save this image very important because otherwise well you can't open it Photoshop but yeah all right I'm not going to restart this tutorial I've already done this twice cuz I keep messing it up and I say something stupid then I get self-conscious and then I start all over so we're just going to save this snow painting map save as image all right so go ahead now and uh you can see I'm watching some uh YouTube videos to procrastinate and we're going to load it up in our our image editing soft W of choice now in my case I obviously prefer Photoshop if you want to use that's fine we don't have to start a war over it you know but I will say one thing you know some people say like Andrew you should be using because can do everything that photoshop can which might be true you know but that's not enough of the argument okay I'm going to just spend a little moment here because people say that a lot like you it can do everything that X software can do right but you can also go from New York to London via dinghy you know that I know that's not a fair comparison but that's not the end all goal like just to find software that is as good as another one like that can do the same thing it's more than that it's what can get you there the fastest with the least amount of pain and the most amount of flexibility and I personally find that photoshop fits that for me for me all right um I just find the brushes it gives you a lot more control over the brush types uh masking and layers and just overall the interface I find is a lot better it's not perfect there's a whole bunch of problems which I'm sure I'll run into in this tutorial but overall I like Photoshop all right now before I start I will say I am using a tablet a stylus okay uh you don't yeah you don't need a stylist to follow this but it will absolutely certainly help because you will able be able to use pen pressure sensitivity um so you can like fade in and out depending on how how you know hard you're pressing so that's definitely going to help but you can use a mouse if that's all you have as well all right let's get painting we're only uh yeah 10 minutes in all right in in this part okay so um first thing we're going to do is I'm going to create a new layer directly underneath this map here and I'm going to make let's just hide that one and I'm going to set this color to be gray like a 50% blend of white and black and that value there see is about the right one so oh sorry about that my phone just fell off the screen 50% and load that into the background by hitting control backspace and there it is loaded in there um now the reason I'm setting that to be 50% gray is that the displacement will work based on the dark and the light values so uh for example a dark value this would become a hole in the displacement like it'll become like a divot a d dip like something carved out of the ground um on the other hand something white will be a raised surface so the reason we're using gray is so that we have an exact mid-range so we can now keep this as the solid color of the of the snow like all the standard snow is this much and then if something is raised like a little chunk of snow or something like that that one's going to be white and then if it's something like a tire track that's going to be darker and that's going to be uh you know lower than the average you know so that that's why we're uh we're using this this exact gray color um now in order to see this over the top of our gray here what I'm going to do is I'm just going to invert that by hitting control I and then I'm going to set this to multiply great now let's actually once I lock this I'll lock that so I don't accidentally paint on it let's get painting the brushes now let's talk about the brushes first before we get to painting um we have created a collection of brushes um we've got nine brushes here we got some tractor brushes we've got uh another different tire brush um yeah bunch of different ones here we've got some Footprints how cool is that and uh yeah a bunch of different displacement stuff and you can get these brushes for just 99 no these are these are free Okay so we've uh we created these brushes and we want to give them to you for free as a gift um we found that we had to look at some brushes online that you could you know download from various places and nothing really worked as well as you know our own brushes we decided to make our own because uh it just yeah it's it's it's gives you a lot more uh we have an exact look that we're trying to go for we're painting snow for Pete sake just placement snow so we've uh We've crafted these brushes and these will allow us to uh create snow that actually looks like no so you can download these by clicking the link underneath this video um this I think it only works with Photoshop I don't I think you can probably load it into as well um if not maybe one of you out there can convert it to for all the followers um but anyways go ahead and download it and let's get let's get painting so I'm going to use this brush right here which is this uh sort of standard uh car tire track looking thing here we go um and I'm going to set the color to be black I'll turn the flow all the way up to one 100 oh come on now 100% see photoshop's not perfect okay and what I want to do is I want to do one fluid stroke of this tire like that okay now the reason this has to be fluid is that if you start wobbling around like that then obviously that does not look like a tire at all that looks like a hand drawn spaghetti line or whatever so you want it to be so this is where having a tablet I guess help or maybe a mouse would probably be better for this I don't know now if you want a shortcut for the actually that looks pretty good I was going to suggest you could use the pen tool go like this whatever and then you right click and then you go set a stroke path go and then it just draws the tire track for you but I managed to do that with uh with one stroke there so that worked out fine um oh dear okay I didn't actually get you have to make sure that you are uh you've got your tie trackers the same width as this line here cuz that was the whole point of doing that scaling thing so let's do that again come on one more do it with your shoulder oh there we go look at that that's a straightish looking line which is pretty good all right cool so now you don't want to paint another one by hand like right next to it because it never matches what you want to do instead is duplicate it and then just uh position it wherever you want okay so I'm just positioning it exactly so it lines up with the uh with the tie track there and that's it so now I can actually turn off that that blocking that we did now we know we've got a correct scale of the scene now we can actually start uh start getting into it so what I'll do now is I'll just uh I'll export this as a JPEG just to demonstrate how it looks in blender so uh ooh gosh what's going on blender okay so with blender loaded up here I'll just switch to my mouse I'm going to go ahead and add in a subsurf subsurface sub what's it called subdivision surface subsurface sub oh my goodness subdivision surface and this is going to give us more geometry to play with so more geometry for the displacement so underneath that I'm going to add in a displacement modifier and I'm going to click new for the new texture go to the texture plane over here click on displace texture and then down here I'm going to load in that image that I've just saved that jpeg there and there we go now if it looks like this that means that it's using the wrong coordinates so for the displacement down here go texture coordinates go from local to UV and there we go look at that directly over where we painted it before we've now got it cutting into the mesh um now this is as you can see it's like pretty low poly the more you set this subsurface to the more it's going to uh you know start looking sharper and sharper but you can see down here it looks like some sort of uh you know Vietnamese death trap or something um it's uh yeah it's very very sharp now the reason reason for that and it's the reason I really demonstrated it is that that is caused by sharpness in our texture here so Al this doesn't look that sharp it really like for a displacement a displacement uh map really needs to be very very smooth so uh let's just merge those two layers there the two tie tracks so they are one and now let's just try that again but I'm going to set it to gorian blur three uh 2.6 yeah kind of blurry like that and I'm going to go export as JPEG save it again and then if I just uh hit that reload button there that little icon there it's now going to reload and look at that so you can see the difference that made so blurring your map is incredibly important if you don't do it you will always always have sharpness in your map okay all right so that's the first beit we've got the tie tracks on now now what we're going to do is we're going to paint the uh a couple of things we're going to cut so a tire would never cut directly through the snow like that like part of the snow would cave in right so that's that's the look that we want to go for in fact if I just load up if I load up uh you know some some reference images that I've got here this is the sort of look that we want to go with you can so you can see that edge there like part of it is like crumbled in um like that so we've got to have that that crumbled sort of edge to it okay so that's what I'm going to do right now in Photoshop on a new layer directly underneath that one there so I'm going to go to the brush and I'm going to use this brush right here so this is like a I don't know it's very very close to uh like a standard soft brush but it's just got a little bit of detail on it okay so for with this brush here selected so I'm putting this underneath the tire track on a new layer and I'm just going to start painting I'm going to set the flow to this to be about 30 % and this is just going to allow me a little bit more of a so oh yeah so the size of the brush has to be a little bit bigger than your tie tracks because you want it to look caved in right that's the whole point of this so I'm just going to go like this so you don't want to rush this too much like I found like every time that I've tried to make uh make the snow and I Rush the displacement painting um which honestly like you can't help sometimes cuz it's it's quite repetitive especially for something like this like tie tracks um yeah every time I rush it it just comes out not looking not looking perfect but at the start it's probably good to rush it so you can sort of learn you know what works what doesn't work um but yeah just just so you know if you find later on that your scene is looking pretty uh pretty crap it's probably because you need a little bit more tender loving care on on your displacements there so uh here we go we're almost oh gosh just goes on and on so I'll just do one of these and then I'll cut to the uh I'll do the other one off screen so you don't have to watch me basically doing the entire tutorial twice okay that seems pretty good to me okay so now I'm going to turn the opacity on that down and for the actual uh let's turn that one off just set the tie track here I'm going to set that opacity down as well like I find like you don't want the tie tracks to be like like that that's way too deep okay so yeah set it to around about 30% and then for the uh this tire thing here as well like the um the caving in uh we might go with I don't know let's try 40 maybe okay that sounds pretty good let's go ahead and Export that yes replace it and hit uh recycle whatever and look at that there we go so you can see now that tie track looks a lot better than this one over here so that's just one little extra area of detail I'll make this uh subsurface I'll set this to four I set it to five sorry so you can see just a little bit more detail in it now we do need to do something for this because you can see like there's a little bit uh it's not too bad actually there's a little bit of jagged edges on this which you could fix by bluring that map but I'm realizing it's actually not that bad and if you set this to smooth smoothing your object is there a hot key for that by the way shading smooth I feel like it's something that's so necessary yeah anyways um yeah it probably needs to be smooth just a little bit so I would go where's my mouse yeah I just take this and I blur it by probably uh no not box blur blur gosh just trying to think like how much more stuff we got to get through and I'm just fiddling with blur I I would just do that okay um but I'll uh I'll cancel that and I'm just going to now just going to paint this other one but again I'm going to pause it so you don't have to see me do it and there we go so now we've got both of them done we've got we've got uh got some tire tracks we've got this divot underneath it in fact we might as well name these Tire TRX uh divot you spelled divot one of those words you don't really need to spell ever except for maybe once every five years divot um now what we're going to do is add on uh we're going to paint on something white white white white white white snow white uh and this is going to be the edge of the divot because basically when a tire plows through some snow it kicks up or it it pushes to to the side you know the snow that it is pressing down so part of it is pressed down and compressed and the other part sort of heaves up out like squishes on the edges so that's a terrible explanation but essentially I'm talking about that edge there that raised Edge which you can see uh that that's what it looks like after it's been there for a few days and then probably snowed on top of it um but like this okay so this this raised Edge there so what we're going to do is we're going to paint a really smooth raised Edge which is going to give it sort of like the volume and then I'm going to use another brush to create that choppy messed up snow which sort of just gets scattered everywhere um like uh whatever yeah I'm looking at Star Wars uh yeah like like uh yeah like basically that that frothy I call it the Scuff the snow scuff okay so we'll do that on a separate uh separate layer after this one let's just do one thing at a time Andrew okay so I'm using uh what brush am I going to use y this same brush here it's nice big one setting it to White uh I'm going to leave the flow at 30 which should be good and I'm just going to paint roughly like that in fact that is way too bright like let's can we turn it down a little bit maybe the opacity is it weird that there's an opacity and a flow and they both do essentially the same thing except for like a few there's like a few functions like uh one of these modes or whatever which treats them differently I don't know but they just ultimately sort of do the same thing right I don't know someone's going to tell me off in the comments uh so yeah it helps actually if you hide the tire tracks and actually I'll set the divot to be 100 just so that you can see it better so essentially where that like where the the caving starts to happen you've got this uh this sharpened Edge there okay so just uh and what this will actually do as well and I learned this uh during my little painting challenge one of the few things that I've learned that's sort of been applicable to blender um but that's the you know relativity is uh relativity for color and anything is uh is so important um that like uh for example like if you're paint like drawing a nose and you're doing like shading on a nose or I don't know why I pick nose just shading anything right and you got to have that highlight like actually like a lot of artists they don't actually do a highlight what they do is like they pick an area that's not shaded for the highlight and then they just draw like it darker around whatever area they want to do a highlight and that automatically makes that area look so much brighter than the rest of the scene just by being in contrast next to something so much darker um which you know I I you know you hear about that a lot like relative and or relation I don't know like how how something compares to something else but just seeing it and and playing with it by hand it was it was so true like it's uh yeah it's just one of those things that that's there as you can tell I'm trying to fill in fill in time with just random chitchat how much oh good sometimes it feels like this just goes on on and on so anyways that is one Edge there um what I'll do though um is I'll now go to I'm not going to do the others I'll do that again while I pause it um but I'm going to go uh I'm adding a mask there and the reason I'm adding this mask is I'm going to flip it to this brush here which is honestly a really really cool brush um and it allow like I'll just show you what the brush looks like looks like this okay it's a really really cool brush just it's like it's the perfect snow brush and I'm just going to use this this mask here and I'm just going to paint just overlay it just a little bit and it's just going to chop away at that volume like not too much but you'll find and I'll probably you'll probably need to do this for the tie track and the divots as well like any amount of variation is going to help you out okay this is so subtle can barely see it there we go so any amount of this very variation is uh it's just going to make it look just a little bit more realistic than none so that's why uh that's why we're doing this basically so remember after we've done this we're actually going to do a separate layer where we're going to be painting on the actual crumbly bit the the the scuff marks uh and that's going to be a little more ramp it's going to be like out here on this gray area over here it's like it's like the the a car was really uh really gunning it through the snow and just like throwing snow absolutely everywhere so we'll do that uh in The Next Step um but that is pretty good so I'll go and save this I'm going to pause the recording now and I'm going to do the others okay so now I've done them both and hopefully you have as well um essentially just uh continuing on and just uh just drawing over the top of it and yada yada yada okay so what I'm going to do is I'm going to put put this here this this white raised volume layer I'm going to put that way at the bottom there just to make sure that this dark value actually gets priority over it a little bit right um and I also I got to set this back to 30% for this divot there we go okay um okay great so that's that's that's looking good I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to save this exported as a JPEG yes thank you Windows uh this one uh and let's go ahead and uh reload into our into our seene here this displacement hopefully it looks okay oh awesome good it's always nerve-wracking because you don't know if it's going to look terrible um but that looks pretty good that's uh yeah it definitely looks like it's been carved out now we haven't even done the detail yet we haven't this is the volume um so we're going to be adding in the detail which is going to be that throw pattern like that uh yeah again I was looking list while I was doing that I was listening to a j AJ abrs interview um this like see those little balls and the little uh little chunks of snow like that's what we're going to add right now that little that's what's going to make this uh look really really cool um cool so what I will do though cuz I noticed looking at this that this is it's way too deep like these these tide tracks so I'm going to lower the opacity on that and this is way too tall so um what that means is uh I'll set this to 30 for the tie track maybe 20 yeah and the divot I'll set that to 20 as well and this raised layer I'll set that to 80 no 60 yeah cool all right so now I'll uh what do I what do I call this one uh raised volume that's kind of what it is so I'll add another layer on top of this one and this is going to be the uh scuff I'll just call it the scuff and for the brush I'm going to be using this brush here uh which again I mentioned is that great uh snow texture brush and what I want to do is uh basically where that that scuff is I want to add in some chunks so these are the chunks I should have just called it chunks um but that sounds a little weird so I'm just painting on right here so you don't want you know you don't want it to be too big like that in fact what I'll do is uh if you modify this this brush here you can adjust the because it's a jewel brush I think it it's yeah it's a Jew but it's got a texture on it so I can adjust the scale of this texture here and uh and that'll make it look a little bit like so if you want like bigger chunks you set that scale up and you can paint like some bigger looking chunks and then if you want smaller chunks you set it like right down and then you you've got you know this little fine little chunky bits here so that's that's what I'll do fact I'll I'll just paint with the small ones and then I'll add the bigger ones uh over the top of this um so again you know just just remembering that this is the sort of look that we're going for that little scuffed you know spray I guess that's sort of over the edge here um and just sort of around like this so you you can see we we're not doing a lot in in blender for this tutorial um but you know like I've said it's really to get the good snow that's done in the image editor that's that's done in Photoshop or it's all about this part this detail that you add here like we're going to add materials later we're going to add you know the lighting and all that kind of stuff and that's definitely going to help but I find like a lot you know like if you look at like you know snow materials online like there's so many people with with snow node shaders and stuff and a lot of it is trying to get like you know you'll see it like it's got a lot of like displacement or like U like a bump map to it like the snow materials and tutorials you find online uh and it's really like you spending a lot of time on like Flakes and like that that shiny effect and things because the snow just doesn't look right like it doesn't look like snow like that you sort of cut into I find like those materials they're kind of trying to fake this like they're trying to get this this you know natural bumpy displacement and really it's not done in the material stage it's done in the displacement stage this is where where your snow is going to start to look like snow um so yeah now if you're wondering like you know why why why isn't there an easy way like why can't we use something like what they used for Frozen like I don't know simulated snow you can if you want you can try and I don't know download the molecular add-on or whatever for blender and try and simulate some snow but it's hugely time consuming probably more than this way more consuming for like CPUs and stuff you know uh it's this is Believe It or Not the easier method and it gives you way more control um doing it like this as well than leaving it up to a computer to to simulate um so I don't know it's one of those things maybe in the future it'll be uh you know it'll become like uh like how Ray tracing is today like how in the old days had to like really fake it spend all this time with bounce lighting and all that kind of stuff and Reflections and now we just get it all for free maybe that'll be the snow of the future I really don't know um okay so that's that's that part there I might do some bigger chunks now so I'm increasing that scale and this is now those uh those big pieces I'll just turn the opacity on it down because we don't want the big pieces to sort of be chunkier than the uh than the smaller ones if you know what I mean uh actually maybe it should be I don't know and the reason I did it instead of like increasing or decreasing the size of the brush because it doesn't matter how big the brush is it's still what it's painting underneath it is like a tiled texture so that's why you have to adjust this uh this scale in the uh in the Photoshop there um but that's yeah it's getting there I'm might add a few ones out here you know all right oh that's a big chunk that'll be all right okay another big one right there so again it's I find like this is true for like a lot of things that you do in 3D like it's big detail with small detail and that's it's that layered look that really gives your realism so that's that's what this is um you did the tiny stuff before and now I'm just laying over some bigger chunks as well maybe the reverse order makes more sense I don't think it really matters but anyways that that now is uh it's starting to look good so what I'll do just to test this out we have to blur it by a fair bit because this is uh yeah this is that that brush which is uh it's quite detailed it's a detailed brush so I'm just going to yeah looks pretty good so I will export this as a JPEG it's probably going to be too high of a mat because it's quite white but let's just load this in we should also see once I hit this um the tire tracks will become lower and this raise part will become lower as well we should see some of that detail thrown over the top there we yeah like I said it's uh yeah it's a little it's a little sharp so I'll try turning that down to 40 um and let's try exporting that and let's see how that looks now because I'm not sure if that sharpness is because it's not blurred enough or because the whiteness is just way too uh way too uh way too white um maybe it is I don't know that from The View here yeah that looks pretty crazy so maybe set it to 20% so I remember when I was I was first giving this a try um using the instructions uh from the guy who made this whole method um the guy who made the final image and everything Gilham um yeah like I I struggled that that's looking pretty good now it's still probably a little bit too rais maybe I'd go like 15 or 10% that's pretty good but yeah when I I started I struggled because I didn't know why uh you know like every value like this whole painting method just felt so random and chaotic and I couldn't figure it out but really it's it's a matter of like trying Small Things testing it out trying small things you won't really know until you try it like you won't know how it's going to look so just you know try an opacity of like 20 try 10 try whatever and just see how it looks so that that there looks pretty good so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to do just like I did before I'm going to start painting in the rest of this stuff here and then I'm going to uh unpause it so I'll do all this while it's paused you know what I mean see you in a minute and and finished there you go so uh yeah that actually took a little while uh I don't want to say 20 minutes but uh it was I think it was about 20 minutes of uh of just painting just trying to get you know comparing it to a photo like this having a look at the sort of scuff marks that appear these little uh you know the little rolly poy uh you know little balls and things like that and just painting it on there um like that so uh so there you go so I'll set the uh the blur again for that even though you probably just really that only just happened in your world but it feels like I've almost forgotten it and then I'll set that to 20% for the opacity and I'm also I think that's pretty good so now if we have a look at this in blender I've already loaded in here so you can see it that is how it is looking so far pretty good pretty good um um so yeah looking looking really really great so far um so yeah make sure you save it it's always uh It's always important um so what we're going to do now is uh is some Footprints because I know a lot of you out there probably working on scenes where you need some Footprints so luckily we have a brush here which is a foot um and now this is actually pretty easy to do um because it's automatically been set up like this brush size so that it is um the exact sort of foot width apart that it should be or at least close you know so we just need to basically set this to Black and then just paint with it so I'll turn the opacity up on that and uh oh make sure it's on its own separate layer of course call this Footprints and like that and I just want to make sure looking at the original here that this is about the same size yes it is good same width anyway that's what matters cool so where do we want the footprints to go it is entirely up to you I'm going to have mine go down the middle here and then go off that side um maybe around here a little bit and then across but something like that so that's obviously the right foot so you got to have the left one as well unless it's a uh onelegged fella but two is generally more realistic realistic so just paint them right next to it and that by the way that Zoom pass it's the Flip Flip Y and flip yeah just flip and then we're just painting like that and you know you can try and tell a story with your Footprints if you want but you know it's pretty well uh it's pretty basic there we go Okay cool so with this we obviously have to blur it um so I'm going to go filter blur Goan blur and really depends on how sort of uh cuz I mean it's a footprint so it should be sort of more filled in anyway maybe like three maybe four yeah that's getting somewhere okay let's try that and I'll also um actually I'll do it this way so I'll duplicate that and then I'll set this to blur some more blur even more like that and then I'm going to invert it and what this is going to do if I put that underneath that one is that's going to give us that raised Edge so essentially we've just done the exact same thing that I did for the tires there um just by doing that so uh yeah so now if I was to uh let's just save this displacement export it and then load this in here by way while that's loading I'll try and get a uh I thought I had some actual Footprints but anyways there we go so look at that that's looking pretty cool come on it's frozen on me oh why is that not working why can't I scroll in and out all right well I'm going to save it because it seems like something's broken that' be right so I had to pause the recording and then unpause it and now that that's worked okay there we go so look at that that's a very deep footprint but I guess it has to be cuz I mean a foot going through the same deep snow that the tire tracks are it's probably still a little too deep though so let's try uh just dial it back a touch dial back that opacity and then the edge as well um because the edge is not that it doesn't have to be pushed out that far in fact it's way too over the top so I might get that to be 40% so just a really subtle subtle amount so let's try this now quick export as JPEG and let's see how this one here looks there we go very very little change actually but you know it's enough it's uh it's pretty good so what you could do is you could uh you know go here and you could uh put you could there you know um make a group for your Footprints and then make a mask for your group another little tip I've learned and then uh you know just paint away at them like paint away which areas are going to be showing through or not like that um you know if if you could be bothered but honestly I find it it kind of looks pretty spot on like this like there's no reason there should be like half a footprint or whatever so I think that's I think that's pretty fine um one thing I will do now with the tie track here is I'm going to load up a uh a mask here for this tie track and I'm going to put some uh yeah I'm going to start carving away cuz if you look at a real photo looking at ones like this like you can barely see the actual tie cuz the crumbly bits like falling on top of it um like it's all over it so we're just adding this to sort of cut away at a little bit and not make it as perfect as it looks so just just go through it like that just fine little bits and just paint over it doesn't have to be a lot but any amount will definitely help because really uniformity is the uh it's the enemy of realism when it comes to CG because nothing in the real world is as perfect and straight as this tire track here is it's just uh it's just way way way too perfect so uh I must say like working with this gray scale thing it really starts to mess with your eyes after a while I'm sure you'll notice it as well but it becomes like one of those optical illusions where you you're staring at a black line for so long that you start to see like it faded like to the left of it or the right of it and uh it starts it starts to look very weird I'll do the same thing to this divot here as well and I'll just paint pain away little areas here um and this is just going to act like that little crumbly Rubble bit on the uh in the in the tie track there so uh I don't know how and just a little bit not too much maybe that flow should be turned down a bit but little bits like this it's this part here which is going to get this step I mean which is going to add your realism for you just just making it look that extra little bit more believable and then when you post it online people are going to go wow it looks like snow so realistic and uh and you'll know why it looks realistic it's because you spend all this effort on this step this has got to be really uh frustrating for those of you at home just watching this on YouTube just slow slowly inching your way through it all right let's export this one let's see how this one looks refresh we should see the tie tracks here look a little bit more randomized the divot areas we should start to see it looking a little better there we go so that was a little too much yeah a little a little too much so I think with this group here tie track I think you can actually oh you can't turn down the opacity of the mask mask options no that's the color of the opacity so what I'll have to do is use another brush to go the other direction so I will paint because it is a mask so I'll be painting like that on top of it and then if you paint enough oh it's the wrong one you can start to erase it a little bit so yeah I used a brush which was too powerful so I'll just do this over the top of everything that I've already done all right now I'm going to pause it whilst I'm doing this and there we go so now I've painted over a little bit we put it back in blender I've already loaded it in and there you go so now it's just that little bit of extra you know realism for the actual tie tracks itself which is pretty important because you can actually see into them from where this camera is so that is pretty important okay cool so make sure we save this now now what we're going to do is do a little bit of sculpting on the surface of this snow here because uh that's looking incredibly incredibly flat out there so with our plane here I hate how blender does that it's like you select an object but blend is so slow to catch up and you have to keep the mouse exactly where it is otherwise I've hit control there we go otherwise it moves it which is the most annoying I don't know bug I guess guess it's a bug right anyway and turn the Sub Surf down there we go it's caught up finally set my render to five so I don't forget it and now let's do some sculpting so go into sculpt mode like this and let's go let's see okay and what I want to do is I might just put this as a camera over here just want to paint in uh oh you can see mirror is turned on as well so it's painting on both both sides so if you want to turn that off just go down to Symmetry and then uncheck X and now you can paint on uh like normal um okay so I'll put that over here actually I might do it in the other direction because that makes more sense you okay there we go so um you know you could use just the uh the standard um you know uh proportional falloff and just go into edit mode and just grab some pieces and just make them bigger or smaller um but you just get a lot more control with the uh sculpting brush I'm going to turn down the uh the strength of this it's a little heavy and we're just just painting on this uh like a little snow bank over here so however much you want to do here is entirely up to you it's really uh it's one of those things where you know there's I I haven't really worked out a clear answer as to what's better to have more or less of this but really I'm and a lot of this is to do with composition so if you haven't seen my composition tutorial you should check that out um but there there's a lot to do with with guiding the viewer um now in this case we've got some tie tracks going down the scene here so that's very it's very useful because it guides the viewer down those tie tracks the the pathway um but having these edges curled up here it kind of works like a dis uh like a vignette um by keeping the viewer's eyes locked you know in this uh in this viewport you know like like down the road so it doesn't it's not veering off to the sides because you've got this uh raised edges basically so uh yeah anyway as you can see just trying to fill in the time here whilst I uh sketch all this in here and I think that that is pretty good actually a little bit more on that side raise that one up there we go Okay cool so snow is looking like snow at least in the uh in the displacement view now we can finally get into the lighting now when it comes to lighting an outdoor scene like this one um you know you can do the traditional method of lighting you know adding a sun lamp uh I don't know rotating it like that and then uh I don't know maybe add in a sky color to sort of act as that and you can certainly do that but the trouble with this is that you know the the colors aren't correct um you know you can adjust these a little bit like that but it's really it's fakery faking The Real World um and not only that but the the snow here which we're going to be adding a material soon to give it reflectiveness it's not reflecting the sky like it's this uniform blanket blue color as opposed to there being clouds and yada yada yada um so instead um what I'm going to be using is you might have already guessed it uh an that we developed at blunder Guru called PR liting Skies um and there it is so PR lighting Skies was uh it was it was made for this purpose um allowing you to get you know realistic outdoor lighting at the click of a button so it's all photos from The Real World like these 360° panoramas um which cast as you can see very realistic lighting accurate to the real world like you know that that Spotlight there is like casting the light onto this scene here and this blue from over here is casting blue in that direction and the reflections everything will look good so essentially I I it was developed because I you know hit this problem all the time like you're making a scene you want it to look realistic but adding hdrs and everything was just uh way too timec consuming so um anyways so if you are interested in PR lighting skies and you don't have it already um you can download it by going to the URL listed at the bottom here or you can click the the link underneath the video which will take you to uh to the purchase page um so anyways that's what we're going to be using so go ahead and uh yeah use it if you've got it otherwise just uh just follow along as best you can um so I prefer like for this sort of scene I think like a morning sort of sort of light suits best because like if this sort of lighting was like in the like the noon of the day like it doesn't make that much sense because my limited experience with snow whilst living in South Korea was that this sort of thick snow doesn't last very long once the sun comes up there's a few hours before it all starts to melt and turn to slush so you know your lighting scheme should be consistent with that um so I'm going to stick with something for the morning um let's try just cycle through them that one there look pretty good number 11 is pretty good as well I like number 11 number 12 it's a little bit too deep that blue though for me so I might go with this one this one actually looks pretty cool yeah um we could turn down the sky or the sun if we want but I might just leave it as is for the moment yeah okay that looks uh that looks pretty good so what I'll do is I'll just give this a quick render with uh with what we have at the moment five uh sub surve for this and let's just let's just see how this looks okay okay so that looks pretty good it's uh yeah it you can see the displacement Works fairly well and uh the snow looks very detailed which is very very good because contrast to how it looks yeah snow is actually very detailed as we already discussed what needs addressing now is that material because gosh darn it it looks horrible looks like plaster um and by the way if you're worried about this background we're going to fix that at the end there with uh with some trees as well um but for now the pressure issue is this snow material so let's take a look at some photos you can see I'm cting again well look some Game Grumps um okay so this is a photo of uh snow um now so what we want to try and do is uh is is recreate a number of the the things you can see here so you've got this tiny little fine like grain like grains of sand it looks like like really really tiny uh little bumps across the surface um you have the little Flex of uh reflection uh being cast into the uh into the camera there a little sparkly light you've also got like very subtle to see but it's like this like larger scale bumps across it like just sort of like ripples across it very very small there um a little bit of subsurface as well probably like the light actually casting through it like you can probably see it just on the top of that Ridge there like light sort of just yeah passing through that so um yeah so that those are the sort of things that we want to try to create um with our material setup now it will be quite Advanced I do have to give you a bit of a heads up there is quite a lot uh involved in get making it work but yeah it should uh I'll try and explain it uh the best way that I can uh you can delete that image that we've placed there by the way cuz we don't actually need that anymore so the first thing we'll try to create is that that fine grain bump uh across the surface so to do that I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to add in a noise texture so a noise texture is great whenever you need sort of uniform bump um that just looks like noise um go figure so I'm going to go and plug this into the diffuse by taking the factor output and putting that into the normal input now the reason that's doing that is because we haven't sort of converted this black and white into something that this uh Shader here can use so to do that I'm going to add in a bump node and drop it in between it and then make show you uh I don't know why it defaulted to that it should be this height so drop that in right there and now you can see you've got this swirling pattern across the surface but you'll see like the swirls are sort of like going along the surface of where we've done that sculpting and that means that the coordinates are a little bit screwed up so what it should really be it should be using the generated coordinates oh not yeah hang on let me just load this in uh texture coordinate Noe how did know I wanted that um that'd be cool if blender started predicting things like like that uh let's we're going to take the output of the object and put that into the noise uh Vector input there and now it's it's using the right one I don't know why but this generated one you'd think that would be the one you need but yeah anyways so we're saing that to object and I'm going to set this scale here to be something crazy 150 which is giving us that really fine uh grain sort of look and then of course you want to turn down the strength here so I'm going to set this to point 05 like that so there you go looks like the surface of a golf ball well no a leather couch more like it but also snow right right means we're getting somewhere okay that's good um and those values there are pretty good cool I'm using on my other screen here I've got the actual node setup I need to follow cuz there's a lot a lot of moving pieces here and you don't want to mess it up so one other thing is like this this looks like plaster like there should be some sort of Reflection from the Sun not the the sun specs like the little Fleck how do you go like glitter not that effect yet we'll do that later but just sort of like a fine smooth look across the surface so for that I'm going to add in a glossy Shader and just use a mix node put that into the bottom input and then I'll set this to uh let's go25 it sounds like I'm guessing I'm just reading the next screen next to me um and this is just like a blend so if you go all the way that way it's diffused this way it's all the way glossy so yeah just about 02 and then I'll take that bump and make sure that's being used for the glossiness um as well and that is pretty good so that you know that looks quite shiny so if it's too like this is kind of like if it's been melted a little bit like actually I had a photo here which was pretty good yeah like this you could tell this snow is like melting so I wouldn't want to be climbing it you know um it looks like it's going to slide off pretty soon um yeah yeah so if yeah if if that's you know if that doesn't work for you um oh the other thing as well you probably want to turn up the roughness so it's not as uh as sharp cuz otherwise it really does look wet um so something like that looks pretty good um but yeah if it's too much you can just you know turn it back or whatever to really I mean that's the thing like some somebody's memory of snow might be very different to uh to the one you've made so they might be like oh that's not how snow looks but really like it as the uh Inuits have said like no two snowfalls are the same like they've got I don't know 40 words to describe snow or something I don't know if that's a myth anyways I don't know why I'm just keep talking we got stuff to do let's create now those little sunflex what do we call it flicks Let's uh let's I don't know let's call it uh let's call it glitter let's create the glitter so I'm going to go ahead and add in a veroni texture here using the same object like the texture coordinate object texture coordinates for that Veron texture and um let's just plug this into just so we can actually see it uh what can I do here let me see just so we can actually see how this looks let's plug that into that okay so that that is the effect that we've got right now across that surface all right that's not how we're going to use it this just so that I can demonstrate of how it looks now if we choose cells then that's how this looks right here so this is giving us some sharper like I don't know like desert cracks um now if we turn this way way way down or sorry way up that makes the scale of them smaller and smaller and if you go really really low it starts to look like Flex glitter let's just call it yeah I'm going to call it glitter from now on uh so we want to basically have this effect a glossy Shader so I'm going to add in a separate glossy shade not this one here we'll leave it this is going to act as like the fine shine across the whole surface and this is going to be a separate one on top of that okay so we're going to add in over here after the mix Shader I'm going to add in an ad Shader let's just drag this in over here and so that we can cut like Define which parts are glossy and which parts aren't I'm going to add in a mix Shader and then take the output of this Factor input and then put that in there so now if we look in close enough we should be able to see like a glittery type of effect across the surface let's try uh let's try 100 there there we go there we go we're getting somewhere okay now that doesn't look very good it looks like it's barely working so here's a trick um and this is one that uh yeah it it it had to be explained to me um so when the artist that uh that I hired Gilham Gilham shout out to Gilham Henrik made this scene he uh he created this weird setup and it's basically taking the color output of this veroni texture and then feeding it through a normal map which was odd to me cuz normally you don't ever do that why would you put normal map is used for images of a specific normal map type of texture this is a image texture but apparently this raw Veron texture like if you have a look at it just through the this uh this diffuse like you see that that colorful noise there across the surface that is very similar to a normal map texture so what you can actually do is you can cheat you can use that feed it through a normal map texture then put this through the uh into the glossy shade there and look at that it starts to behave like the uh the glitter like it's at different surfaces cuz if you look at real snow like uh where was it I guess this one um like it it reflects at weird angles because it is like tiny little grains of sand some of them are rotated at different angles so you're going to get Reflections uh depending on like that aren't all lining up with the sun if that makes sense like if you look along the surface of a car reflection like on the Bonnet or whatever it only you see it if the sun is directly behind it but that's not how the the snow works like you're getting you know glittery Reflections everywhere so that's what this is doing like it's giving us that glittery reflection um in places that aren't directly in line with the sun cuz like if you remove that you could see there's no glittery reflection there it's only going to line up with wherever that glossy Shader is right so by feeding it through there then you actually get it so that is cool that's a cool little thing um and directly underneath it what I'm going to add in to put into the the slot underneath it is a translucent Shader and this you won't see too much of a difference but I'll show you anyway this is the before and this is the after just very subtly like some of those sunflex start to sort of pop out a little bit as well very very very subtle um so you'd be forgiven if you just completely ignored it but it just adds a little bit more of a boost to those uh that that glittery effect okay cool um now this this size of this I think is actually too big so I'm going to drop this down to 300 make it a little bit finer and then I'm going to make it a lot finer still and I'm actually going to duplicate this whole node setup the whole thing just so I can do one little change here and that is to make this a lot smaller um and then I'm going to duplicate this mix Shader drag this into the bottom one there and now you can see if I zoom oh hang on from the camera view let's Zoom right in there you can now see we've got really really tiny little Reflections which is this new one right here like if I just pull that all the way that way that's the uh really tiny Reflections and then this is the big one right there so essentially yeah it's like uh what is that five times five times let's try that yeah it's five times um Okay cool so there we go so now we've got some tiny little glittery dots and bigger ones oh and this amount here it really depends on how much you want like if you want lots of big ones you can go that way or if you want little ones you can go this way um I mostly go little ones with a little bit of the big ones and that's about it for that um let me just check my notes [Music] here yes oh the other one you might want to play with as well is the roughness um so I'm going off the Record here the uh the real material setup that I'm following here has like this invert thing plugged into here but it doesn't look good so I'm actually uh I'm I'm I'm recommending something else so essentially this roughness like the more you set this like The Wider it's going to be like the more of that glittery reflection you're going to get um but the less sort of concentrated it can look um but anyways I don't know I think that default value there actually looks all right so let's just leave that as is all right oh one other thing you might want to change as well is the strength of it so let me just drop this down actually just so we're only looking at one so we can play with the value and see how it looks so we're looking at the big one here now if you uh reduce this strength amount you're going to get more of that uh more of those little glittery effects you'll get more or less like at at a certain value so like 0. five you'll get more and then you start to get less and last as it goes up I think let's just increase it more and more let's see how it goes yeah so if you go like really far One Direction and you get way less yeah like if you go to 10 you get very few which that's actually pretty good I think that's that's good I might go 10 yeah stuffer let's just go 10 with both of them cuz I think there is too much glitter there it does look a little too shiny so that's all right let's yeah let's go with that cool great awesome all right so now what we need to do is give it a um a very subtle just across this because this surface here looks way too soft and silky um it needs to look a little more a little more noisy a little bit more of a bump to it so we're going to use this displacement um input for the material here which is very similar to putting it through this normal of the shaders but you can't fit two in one so uh so what I'm going to do is I'm going to add in a noise texture right here and I'm going to feed it through a multiply mix so basically a mix Shader no sorry math node set to multiply and then this basically controls its uh its bump amount so if I drag that into there um let's just turn this up okay there we go so it's got that swirly effect again so we need to make sure that we're using the correct object output for that uh for that map there we go so that's way too strong obviously so let's dial that back to something like that not bad and I'm going to increase the scale or TR drop the scale to about four but increase the detail to the maximum so that's giving us that fine um sort of amount across it um which is uh which is pretty cool I think that bump is too high though so I'm just dialing it back a little something like that now this is actually sort of Amplified because the sun is directly behind us or sorry in front of us I guess um so if we you know I don't know if I had this like coming from another Direction you wouldn't see as much of that bump you kind of do uh but you know what I mean it's uh just sort of playing around with it now yeah but that that snow is really starting to look like snow so that's that's a good thing um one thing I might do though is I might just increase this this glossy amount here just to get more of a finer shine across the surface so I'm just dropping the uh roughness to it just to make it look a little bit more melted like you know the sun is shining directly on it like there's got to be a lot of uh you know melted sort of look to it so I think that should help make it look a little bit more realistic but uh yeah let's try that cool all right so I'm going to go ahead now and give this a render with our new material let's see how that looks all right there we go that is actually looking pretty cool that is not bad um H yeah pretty good one thing that it is definitely missing though is um subsurface scattering uh so here's a before and after from another scene that I was working on with a different lighting Setter which looks pretty cool so this is before subsurf and this is after so if I just go in between the two you can see difference there it's subtle but it gives it a softer more realistic look cuz essentially what subsurface is doing for those who don't know is uh you know real light passes through a surface so when it passes through you know your ear or something like that you can see you know red blood cells and things like that so you know this the sun is passing through the snow so it's um yeah it's essentially passing some of that light through so you can see like if we zoom in there oh you can't go back and forth but you can see like on that little piece there like the the light passes through that so it sort of Fades into it um so that's what we want to add here so it'll it will probably mean that you might need to render on CPU no actually you can render with GPU um but yeah it does it does add a little bit of noise to it maybe but it does just add a subtle little kick to it which can just help make it look a little bit more realistic than without it so let's go ahead and add that very simple it only needs two nodes the mix node and this subsurface scattering node sorry was just trying to connect everything there there we go um so I'm going to drop that into the bottom input right there and I'll just drag that all the way over to one just so that we can focus on um how this looks in our scene over here so it says it only works in experimental mode for GPU so let's put it on experimental node let's do what the blender says um and for the scale I'm going to turn it way down to be 0.1 which is just going to give it just a small amount of of scattering through it um before it starts to fade out so the more you set that to like the greater distance it will you know allow the light to pass through it but I'm just going to go 0.1 like that um and that's pretty good and now that I've done that I can then fade that into the rest of the scene that we just had before setting that to point so this is the scene that we had just the entire scene that we had there before and then if I set this to be point Point 2 then that works there now the light is actually shining through directly like through the bottom of the mesh there so you know you could fix this by just going uh I don't know grab this bottom one here drag that down um I'm sure there's a probably a better solution to this isn't it I'm just not thinking of it but that's that's the one that I would do anyway um but there we go um I'm actually not really a big fan of this this light setup anyway so I'm going to go for a uh a Different Light setup let's go for yeah you can see it does take a little longer to render now that we've added that that subsurface there but um yeah as you can see like the light really does make a difference to the scene like the light setup that you choose so you know Choose Wisely friends because it can mean the difference between a good or a crappy render um all right that's I'm just going to try and get a little bit more light peeking through there but that's that's pretty good all right so now let's do another render yeah this lights I like it now that I've had a look at this one the before just wanted to uh throw that one in there cuz I thought it actually looked a lot better than the one we' created so let's now give this another render with those settings and uh let's see how that looks all right the uh Cuda ran out of memory let's try it on [Music] CPU the uh fallback for any uh well what you have to do every day if you're on AMD all right let's see how it goes with CPU okay there we go so it finally uh finally finished cool so you can see here we've now got a little subtle amount of Sub Surf going through the snow you can really see it on there oh nice grease pencil um but there you go um cool now what we're going to do is go ahead and add in the trees into the background the final final piece of the puzzle and uh of course on Q my monitor has uh I'm using that focks thing that thing that like changes your display and right at the moment resume recording it kicks on there we go makes the screen yellow probably can't see it in the recording all right so to add the trees in the background um we're actually going to be using another product from blender Guru Shara uh called the backdrop pack um so what this is is um well first of all let's just I'll just show you so to use the backdrop pack we just use the import images as planes add-on just a add-on great add-on that works for any images but it works great for um for this stuff in particular going to go import images as planes oh look here we are um so what this is is a collection of alpha masked um trees and in particular tree lines um cuz essentially it you need it for basically any any scene you're working on it helps to have something on the horizon if you've got like a bare Horizon it just looks fake and uh I went online and I tried to find you know tree lines and they basically aren't any um so we H had to hire some photographers around the world to uh you you wouldn't be you would be amazed at how hard it is uh to find an area where you can actually photograph like a bare Tree Line like this but anyways enough about that if you want if you're interested in getting this pack um just click the link here and you can get the backdrop pack and get all these images and uh it's you know hope you find it interesting so I'm just going to try a couple let's try um let's try this one um the most important thing is you want to check use Alpha so that it uses the um the PNG Alpha um background there and then make sure you use emission and transparent or if you want the light the actual sunlight to hit it you can use diffuse and transparent I'll just try a mission um and let's just see how this one looks so the reason you use that import as images PL as ples is that it gets the Right image Dimension so there's no like stretching or anything like that um anyways so I'll just drop this into the backdrop here oh yeah I had to add in this plane here so if you find a problem with like your scene where the light to like shining through it like through the snow part there I I just to fix it I just added a plane just randomly and it just fixed it I tried a whole bunch of different things whilst the recording was paused um I don't know why but I didn't actually need this for my uh for my final render that I've been experimenting with it's one of those cases where everything goes wrong whilst the recording is going but it's such a large scale tutorial I'm hoping you guys will forgive me if you don't screw you who cares no I'm kidding all right so let's see how this looks here uh I'll put it back into GPU just so we can render it and there we go so we've got some trees chilling on the background there now in this case those trees look pretty fake because that doesn't match the lighting so the trick really comes in uh in finding one the best uh the best sort of image to use for something like this um but you can also experiment with instead of you know the option that I had before was emission or diffuse so to save me from using the add-on again I'm just going to very quickly switch it out like this okay that's a little better I mean it doesn't quite match the uh the scene cuz I guess it's just in total darkness but you know it's better than nothing um which is which is right you know what I might just add a couple more let's just see what else we can do here see what else there is oh dear what have I done okay so I'm going to go file import images as planes and let's try a different one how about this one this one's got some sunlight hitting on it generally sunlight is pretty hard to uh to get it to match like any sunlight you've got in your scene if it's in the background it definitely helps but uh yeah it's it's a bit fiddly this is just one of those things though where it feels like it's a small thing you know like why are we bothering to spend time on this you know when we've done all you know the snow is the the main part of it but this extra little bit at the end here it definitely helps to uh make the scene feel complete and that doesn't fit at all cuz that is completely the wrong sunlight to be working for this scene um oh dear okay let's try it again let's try another one I'm going to try one more if the next one doesn't work we'll just leave it with those uh trees in the background there uh let me see here let's see how about you know we could use that one or we could use this one I think this winter one here will actually I'll use this one oh what's it doing there we go let's use this one I think this one will work cuz this one at least sort of looks like it should be uh in darkness you know so let's drag that in um yeah so there we go so you know what I might just fix it by having the Sun come from the uh from the rear again and that looks a little better kind of no maybe it's not maybe it's better you know over on this side um but you know what this is all fiddly stuff and I'm sure very few of you are even still here watching you're like all right we get it Andrew that's it um you can add trees in the background and the final image um but anyways the main part of this tutorial was of course the snow so I'm hoping uh I'm hoping that you guys will find some use for this and uh and make some cool looking scenes with it um as you can see it is really all about that displacement part that painting of the displacement it's um yeah don't overlook it cuz that is where the goal is that's where the nuggets are so uh so keep at it and uh if you make something cool please post it in the comments on blend Guru I like uh you know uh browsing through it every now and then and seeing what people have been making so um yeah if you make something cool please post it in there um and as always thank you all for watching and uh see you next time bye

Channel: Blender Guru

Views: 667,594

Keywords: Blender (Software), tutorial, snow, cycles, How-to (Website Category)

Id: 82zWmOqE0Nc

Length: 84min 58sec (5098 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 16 2015