Does anyone know how to make it snow?

[katiki]

I was wondering if there was a way to make snow fall from the sky. If you know how or have any ideas please let me know. Thanks. :confused:

[hgs]

When I saw this on my newsfeeds there was almost nothing to tell me it was in the Alice forum, so the question looked like it was for the real world!

I think you'd need a particle system to really do this. I've not explored billboard images, but if you can have animated gifs with transparency then you might be able to put snow at the front, back, and sides of the space, but as the camera moves about you'd lose that. Maybe you can have a billboard with the camera as vehicle, so if you get close to an object your snow moves behind it.

[DrJim]

Just the billboard method with alpha level transparency works fairly well – see attached example. I also included a Photoshop version of the snow layer in case anyone want to improve that (it certainly could use improvement).

Alternately you could use the image file as a texture for a simple object or use multiple copies of the billboard. I find these approaches take more work than they are worth in terms of what they add to the resulting video – but someone with more artistic talent than me (the vast majority of the population) may have differing opinions.

As with all particle effects, the key is in the details. Alice is quite nice in that you can vary the speed of the fall, opacity, color (though that doesn’t do much for snow), expansion rate, etc. over time with relatively simple methods – try it yourself with the example world.