How would you make this snow buildup?

PollySong

I need to quickly add snow in a pretty large scene, where it piles up around the base of objects. Only on one side, as if the snow has been blowing in from one side. A bit like the image below, but maybe not as heavy.
The end result needs to be a mesh. I have to Modo and 3ds max (and Blender I guess, but I don't know it that well). How would you do that? Any help appreciated.

Ryusaki

I would model these piles roughly with a low to medium dense mesh and merge them with the ground mesh (or create them from the ground mesh).
Then i would add detail with sculpting, bake these details into a displacement map and apply this on the original ground mesh.
That way your scene is not as heavy while working with it and you could easely layer in more details per texture or polymodelling.