Super Simple Procedural Fallen Snow

Very simple procedural snow generator in Houdini. Looks more like frosting up close, but we could possibly use something like it for more background/distant objects.

http://vimeo.com/30362133

Awesome Computer Generated Snow Layers

VFX Breakdown from Larkin Flynn on Vimeo.

Visual Effects Inspirtation

Snow and Ice




Ice (around 0:40)

Inspiration

Some screenshots showing some various ways to handle ice and snow:

Sources:

Animal Planet Antarctic from Blue Zoo on Vimeo.

Blue-Zoo Xmas 2013 from Blue Zoo on Vimeo.

Tine Milk (Music & Sound Design) from Echoic : Music and Sound Design on Vimeo.

 The last three screenshots are from The Snow Queen, a Russian film. It's on Netflix.

Snowing Reference

thought that having an effect like this could be cool, due to snow the atmospheric perspective is much more apparent.

News report of snow storm:  http://www.wwnytv.com/news/local/The-View-From-Tug-Hill-239108531.html

More Style Ideas

I was thinking what Brent was saying yesterday about not wanting to try to copy Frozen.  I was trying to think of some different ways we could do snow.  I thought of ways I had seen snow in different movies and grabbed some screenshots of different types of snow.  Not all of them are the best pictures, but they can hopefully give an idea.

 Elf--The north pole is pretty simple and throws back to the old stop motion.  The snowflakes are actual flake shapes, and pretty fun.

The snow on the ground almost seems to have a hard texture to it, rather than the soft, blanket type snow.

Nightmare Before Christmas--The snow is soft, and the glitter is definitely played up.

Some Rudolph Movies--

I know we're trying to go for a style of our own and not copy any movies, but here are some slightly different types of snow.  I also noticed that the backgrounds in many of them don't feel like actual sky.  Perhaps there is some way to make the atmosphere seem a bit more stylized as well.  Naturally, I think the snow should be designed based on the feel of the story, but I just thought I'd throw these ideas up here.

Technical Snow Reference

I thought it'd be a good idea to look at a few of the important papers about snow from siggraph over the years. This one talks about how to correctly model fallen snow. It goes into a lot of detail and gets very physically accurate, but the basic idea is simple. I actually tried it out in Houdini and it's not too difficult:

This paper outlines the method that pretty much everyone used to simulate snow before Frozen. It would allow us to easily get footprints and simple packing motions. It doesn't look incredible, but it gets the job done. And it's pretty fast and cheap.

And then, of course, there's the paper about the snow from Frozen. It's a completely new method that's very complicated and time intensive. But it looks amazing.

And here's a really random bit of reference from the internet. Frozen bubbles! How cool is that?

Caucasus Mountains

Most of these photos are from mountains in Russia or Georgia:

Ice Climbing

Mountains and Snow