V-Ray | How to do PROCEDURAL SNOW | Displacement Workflow, VRayDisplacementMod

hey in this tutorial we'll learn how to make realistic snow so for that we're gonna go through a general displacement workflow in v-ray build custom procedural maps to generate detail and then build a realistic snow shader for the final result so this one right here is the seam that we're going to be using i have a reference picture here of a snowball which i found online which i like so it has like one part of the snowball which is in sunlight the other one will be in shadow and then also i think the shape is kind of interesting so it has like these kind of small details here on the edges which are also responsible for these kind of highlights here these kind of glints here and the lid parts so we try to recreate also something like this so the workflow basically would be to first this place here our geometry to have this kind of shape and then afterwards apply a snow shader to it to make it look correctly so if i render my scene i get this kind of result at the moment and you can see it has some very basic lighting setup already in place so the sunlight here on the back and some hdri for reflections but other than that let's first focus about the displacement here and i applied this vr displacement modifier put it to subdivision and now our sphere is being subdivided during render time and how can we preview this we can apply here in our diffuse map v-ray edges texture and then we can see actually how much geometry is really generated during render time so now by decreasing this edge length here we can generate more geometry because each of those little black lines you see would be one edge and it would be subdivided 256 times until it reaches in this case an edge length of two units and the lower you go the more it will become subdivided but let's first switch back to four here and then let's add this kind of gradient ram texture in here to just understand how this displacement modifier is working so it's a combination out of two different kind of effects one is that it can subdivide our actual geometry and then displace this geometry following like whatever texture map we put in here but the other thing is that if it doesn't have enough subdivisions here it will also generate these kind of details by basically applying a normal or bump map on top of everything and it kind of creates this illusion of detail so it's always like this combination out of those two elements in here so now if we lower this edge length here then we will introduce a new geometry that's being displaced and now we actually have a chance to follow the shape that's defined here in our map so the lower we go the more detail we have in our actual geometry and the more it represents our real shape so for example if i go to 0.5 then i think now the shape if i hide here this edges texture here already looks more or less like how it should be maybe even a little bit less because here on the edges there was some small mistake so for this scene with this resolution and this camera distance i think the edge length of 0.2 is fine if we go in here we can see there's a little bit of a tiny problem here let's just decrease the edge length even lower and then we can see this part now also looks totally clean from this distance there's also an option to make it depending on like how far you're away with it from the camera let's not get into this to simplify stuff so i think always try to not make this edge length here too low because otherwise it will increase a huge amount of geometry detail in here which v-ray can handle but stuff like gi calculation and so on will be significantly slower than if you have these details being generated by the normal map that's also applied to with this displacement modifier in here so always try to go as high as you possibly can in order to make it speed up as fast as possible but anyway now with this little bit of theory out of the way let's focus about how we can generate some interesting displacement map here for our snowball so now i cleared up everything applied a new v-ray displacement modifier and added this composite map in here at the moment just has this one noise map in here and later on we're gonna add more and more layers to make a more complex looking effect so now let's check out our first noise layer let's choose a different size for example like 15 now we get some displacement already that's coming from the noise i think at the moment the contrast here is too strong so let's dial down here the contrast a little bit so that we don't change the overall sphere shape here of our model and then we can switch here this noise type to for example a fractal and this way we will introduce different scalings of noises on top of each other so we have a bigger noise and smaller noises and here with this levels we can define like how many of those noise levels are applied together so for example something like 5 we have already more detail and if i go all the way up to 10 you have quite a lot of detail that's happening here on our sphere geometry and now we can add like a new layer in here so i just make a new layer and we just use the existing one here as a starting point and then let's dial in here some different settings so for example i want to make some kind of cracks in here some kind of deeper areas and some kind of areas which are more flat and have less detail so for example i can choose a lower height value in here and then some part would be clamped and everything below this value would be displaced so we have these kind of effect we have like some kind of cracks in here and some kind of stuff which is totally flat and not displaced and now we can just blend both of them together because at the moment we use 100 here of this one but for example if we blend now 50 together we will have a combination of those two different maps here and then you can see we have like some parts where we have some these kind of cracks here which is more rough and then some parts which are much less detailed so now i think we have the general shape in place and now we just need to fine tune it by adding like these kind of little edge details here so it looks a little bit more like some snow material so i would just add a new noise map in here and let's switch this one here for example to a turbo lens decrease the levels here to one and now let's find some very small values something like 0.1 for example to have these kind of spiky effect that's happening you can see at the moment it looks a little bit like some fur material here but we're gonna die that in correctly in a second let me just put here this one to screen and then for example a value of 10. now you can see we will add this part here we have all of those little spikes that are coming out here let me just add like a render region so that you can see it better so we have now all of those little spikes that are coming out here i think at the moment it's like too many so we can go in and just clamp here the low value to for example 0.15 and now we will clamp the noise in many parts so that we only have like these kind of small stuff that's apparently here everywhere you can see our edges are now broken up a little bit and we have all of those little like spikes that are added here on our geometry so if i just go back and render the whole thing then you have something like this already which again looks more complex than what we had before it looks a little bit more like snow and now as a last step let's just add another layer and here and i want to this time also switch this one here to screen and add like a new noise map in here and i want to add some bigger spikes in here so that not everything has these kind of small spikes but some bigger spikes so i would choose here a size of one for example here set to turbulence and then now it's way too much of course so we will add like here a low value of 0.4 this way it will cut away a lot of those spikes and now we just need to take care about the height so we just go in here and just for example choose a screen value here opacity value of 25 and then we have like these kind of two different scales of spikes so we have those small ones which are kind of everywhere and then a little bit less those kind of bigger ones so now i think we're done with this placement and i think it looks already nice in terms of the shape now we need to start working on the shader because at the moment i just use this very standard grayish material here which doesn't look like snow at all so the key to snow is now to add like a subsurface scattering material and i will choose a v-ray al surface material and then just apply this one here and by the way if you want to learn more about subsurface scattering materials there's a whole tutorial that you can also find in my channel so check out this if you want to learn more about subsurface scattering and now let's dial in some of those settings in here so the shader for snow is actually quite simple that i ended up using we just need to adjust this diffuse color here put it for example to 200 first of all that everything looks a little bit more bright and then we need to increase this sss mix value here all the way up to one so that we have the subsurface scattering effect and i will just let it render for a second that you can see how it looks like so i think that looks already quite nice the only problem is that here are subsurface colors they follow more like something that you would expect in skin so you have these like reddish subsurface colors in here so we would need to change that and let me just do that so here for example i will just choose like a white color tone and then for this color here i have something that i can just paste in also some bluish color tone then let's just render this a second and then see how this one looks like so i think this looks nice now the only thing that would change maybe would be the reflection so if we check here the specular we can see we have this kind of nice looking but a little bit broad highlight so i want to have this very strong speckles here this very like white glint here in the sun part so i would change the reflection roughness to zero and the ior to 1.5 and then also switch this one here to ggx and now let's render it a little bit you know if we check your specular layer we have a different appearance we have these highlights which are much more crisp and much more bright so once we rotate the camera around or we rotate the object around those will like jump around and get this kind of glittery effect that you will always see with snow normally so that's basically the end of the shading here and now the only thing that we have to do is to unhide all of our parts here also apply this shader to this part here and then let's this one render a little bit yeah so this one is now our final scene so we have the same displacement here on this nose part and then a few words about these cold parts here actually use exactly the same kind of workflow like the snow the only difference is that these kind of things that i displace here outwards for these co parts i just place those inwards so you can see these kind of holes in here which make it look a little bit more rough and then it's just like a very simple v-ray material applied to them to make the final look yeah and that's basically the final scene so if you're interested in the scene itself you can find this over on my patreon if you like this kind of content subscribe to his channel and also hit this post notification bell to be always be notified about updates when new tutorials are coming out yeah and other than that i hope you stay safe and see you in the next tutorial so see you and take care

Channel: Jonas Noell

Views: 12,499

Keywords: snow, shading, shader, snowball, snowman, man, ball, displace, displacement, vraydisplacementmod, modifier, noise, bercon, workflow, procedural, ice, frozen, frost, cold, environment, vray, V-Ray, Vray, 3ds Max, 3dmax, max, Chaosgroup, Autodesk, NEXT, feature, tutorial, learning, instruction, Vray 5, V-Ray 5, Vray5, vray 3, rundown, making, of, makingof, cinematic, maya, fastsss2, vrayfastsss2, vraystochasticflakes, flakes, stochastic

Id: Wk299wsMvgI

Length: 11min 24sec (684 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 30 2020