Dynamic Snow?

Cyph3r

Hey all I'm working on this scene:





Max Viewport


And I need to add 'dynamic snow' by that I mean a layer of snow that would realistically mimic snow, with different types of snow, dry/wet/powerdery. Maybe using the max particle system?

How would I go about doing it?

Lamont

I think Sandbox does this. Err, let me rephrase that. Is this for work or personal? If it's for personal, take a look at Sandbox. Other than that, best bet would be to gather ref images of snow on objects and go from there.

Cyph3r

Sandbox as in what?

EarthQuake

Crysis engine, right?

You could actually pull off some of this in marmoset, atleast having a falling snow effect, but useless if you need any more complex then that. We had to come up with some features that let you have snow that falls, and stays where it hits, which was really good for snow. If you're interested i may be able to dig up some more info on how to do this.

It may "bounce off" the highway section there tho, not entirely sure how it would work out.

Lamont

Yes, Cry2 has a snow effect that you can apply to everything. Another user on the boards did a cabin with this as well. I found this while looking for tuts on how to use it.

This might be a Polycounter as well, I recognize some of the other work.

Cyph3r

yeah seriously any advice or insight into the subject would be a massive help.

Lamont

CryEngine 2 is free to download it with plugins here: http://files.filefront.com/Crysis+SP+Demo/;8895696;/fileinfo.html.

As for how to use it, I dunno... I'm a UED guy with a smidge of Hammer.

Rick Stirling

is this in engine or for renders only?

Lamont

Rick Stirling wrote: »

is this in engine or for renders only?

Engine for modding.

Slum

What you need is a shader that does a lerp between textures based on up-facing normals. Not too hard to set up.

Edit: Here's a simple shaderfx shader I threw together in a few seconds to illustrate the point.

http://floatvoid.com/code/snow_shader.SFX

Something you might try is setting vertex colors based on vertex normals, and doing the lerp using vertex colors. You might be able to get some interesting blending on stuff like right-angles. Just a thought, haven't tried it yet. Crysis snow does a lot more than this, but it's a start!

Enlighter

Hey guys,

Awesome responses, pretty stoked to see the crew for the project we are working on taking the initiative and posting here to get questions answered.

Felt I would chime in, Cry is 100% not an option for us. It is such a stunning engine, but we are not making a mod, nor do we have the $ to afford a full scale license for something like that.

We are currently working with Neo Axis, which I am sure many of you know, is not as feature packed, but still packs some decent power.

Would the same advice that has been given here transfer over? Should the dynamic snow system be built outside the engine entirely and then brought in and tweaked accordingly?

Thanks a ton. Also this is a pc/mac game and we are looking to make it playable on a wide range of systems, not just the latest and greatest. So hopefully that will help some.

Cyph3r

Hey all, thanks for the responses, and Enlighter is the guy Im working for if anyones wondering.

Slum wrote: »

What you need is a shader that does a lerp between textures based on up-facing normals. Not too hard to set up.

Edit: Here's a simple shaderfx shader I threw together in a few seconds to illustrate the point.

http://floatvoid.com/code/snow_shader.SFX

Something you might try is setting vertex colors based on vertex normals, and doing the lerp using vertex colors. You might be able to get some interesting blending on stuff like right-angles. Just a thought, haven't tried it yet. Crysis snow does a lot more than this, but it's a start!

Can't say i follow what you're saying entirely, care to explain some more?

renderhjs

I cant help but think that such a question should perhaps discussed with your programmer. He might give the best input on this because usually snow is often dynamic and distributed around the scene through scripting.
Maybe look into the feature section
http://www.neoaxisgroup.com/neoaxis/features
it says that it supports particles, maybe even sprite mapped particles in which case you'd then simply could create a single sprite of a white point or glow (depending on style) and distribute it via the particle system in the FOV cage with a seed distribution via programming.

edit:
here is probably a more in depth list of what it really can (without the marketing stuff):
http://www.devmaster.net/engines/engine_details.php?id=383

Enlighter

render,

we have worked with the particle system they have, it's a nice system for sure, but it's looking like we might have to code an entirely new system to achieve what we want.

I have Cyph3r post up here to see if there was any other way to do it as an art asset vs. a code asset. So thank you for the great advice. Will continue researching it with the code team.