Realistic Snow effects

[BLACK_PHOENIX]

how can i get real looking snow on top of roofs and on the floor.
and how can i make snowfall efects.

[jonas]

The snow falling would be rather simple, you could just use particles. Are you wanting the snow to gradually pile up on the roof, or just have it there? easiest way for it to just be there would be to model it. Now for it to pile up you might be able to make the snow model and if possible have the bump map change I know changing material in game is possible but I don't know if you can change the bump map our not.

[Spyrewolf]

no i don't think that bump maps are dynamic unfortunately i remember asking this of wxb1

i think wxb1 was going to implement this sometime ago but he has vanished as of late never to be seen of again.

he showed a demo of dynamic embm bumpmapping, you will have to test to see.

however for snow use floating particles as jonas said with a negative speed value and then attach to the player so you only need one of them, also add an animated overlay to the screen for a denser snow,

overlay waether effects like this were done in GTA3.

[psYco]

Yeah i remember that (the overlay in gta 3) It really looked good. I think that that could work really well to make it look like its raining loads, but the problem would be with snow that it tends to go in one direction or another and with the overlay it would be weird to turn around 360 and always have the snow falling to the left... could work if you made it all fall downwards on the overlay and then the particels going every which and way would create variation...

[GD1]

It would be a resource hog, but you could use FirePoint entities to "shoot" snow projectiles in different directions and then set up these projectiles to leave semi-transparent snow decals when they hit something. The projectiles could have a small particle effect attached to them, preferably an animated flipbook because they use less resources.

This would take a lot of work though. An easier way would be to model everything as if it was covered in snow and then use a particle system to simulate a few snowflakes falling here and there.

[BLACK_PHOENIX]

my main focus is on getting the snow moddeled and placed all around the level. the snowfall is just a small extra effect.

but how can i properly model clumps of snow and then import them into RF?

i can use maya to create super photorealistic snow but it turns out to be thousands of polygons wich will not work with genesis3D.

i was thinking about using nems terrain maker but i still have issues exporting the files and getting them perfectly imported into RF.

[Cynical Gaming]

what you could do is create a simple snowy terrain and export it as a model and then create an animation that gives it varrying shapes (i.e. getting bigger in small simple clumps) and then attach that model unto the places where the snow will clump up and create a long timer that will slowly move up to the max snow clump animation and set it to a static position once it hits that final snow clump. and just create the particle effect snow falling.

sorta simple. was the approach i thought of.

[Spyrewolf]

Actually thats a very good approch Cynical Gaming, you could have piles of snow growing and melting as you see fit.

Nice Idea.

[BLACK_PHOENIX]

i would only think about that if i was using torque.

the snow doesent have to melt and clump up. all i want is clumps of snow everywhere and a realistic snow fall