So, in the following, three images. The image ending on 1 is the Dropsnow
Macro released upon a mesh2-tree from Arbaro *without* the smallest
branches. The result is then placed onto the tree with all branches. It
looks nice, clean and crisp.

The image ending on 2 was Dropsnow released upon the *entire* tree, with all
the small parts. The small "noise" introduced by various very small
components (the smallest branches) would require much higher sampling
settings and, along with higher sampling settings already used to place
enough particles on the tree, the resulting parsing time would increase
exponentially. Of course, for a High-Res Final image, this might be what you
need, and I'm already thinking about how to refine the parsing process and
the resulting data so that small tweaks wouldn't result in an entire
reparsing of the particles, rather than just picking a few different
parameters for the display.

I've got no timings on these, but the simpler one required roughly 5 minutes
or so total, whereas the more complicated one would have required somewhere
around 12 minutes or so, both with roughly 8000 final particles out of a
20.000 initial bunch of which some were discarded due to steepness of
surface, surface too thin, inside mesh, etc.

Overall, I'm very pleased and will have to conduct some more tests on
various objects to see if I need to include a few more parameters for more
control on the User-Side.

And the third and final image is just the macro on a CSG object to show off
the main effects I wanted to achieve: stacking along walls and removing
particles underneath roofs, two of the important issues about snow.

Regards,
Tim

-- 
"Tim Nikias v2.0"
Homepage: <http://www.nolights.de>

Post a reply to this message

Attachments:
Download 'tree_snow_1.jpg' (49 KB) Download 'tree_snow_2.jpg' (53 KB) Download 'csg_snow.jpg' (15 KB)

Preview of image 'tree_snow_1.jpg'

Preview of image 'tree_snow_2.jpg'

Preview of image 'csg_snow.jpg'