Tim, this all looks fabulous. Incredible work. You have something really 
great going on here.

There's just one thing I thought of this morning while looking out over 
the yard, which just acquired its first good snow yesterday. Snow 
doesn't fall evenly or perfectly vertically, and even once it falls 
there's still significant scattering once on the ground due to wind. I 
think a good addition to your macro, if you're still in a programming 
mood, would be a randomization step. It would come after you run the 
particles through the filters but before you calculate drifts. Something 
that would randomize the location of each particle for a small amount. 
You would probably have to run the filters again to make sure you don't 
end up with particles hanging out in space.

I think this would help eliminate that "blobby" look there sometimes is 
and would give it a more natural look. It would also add the very 
natural occurence of uneven coverage and even bare spots on a tree (a 
pine tree in the backyard has small spots of snow (six inches or so) 
every so often and the rest of the tree is bare).

I would also add in a filter that would take snow off of objects that 
are really small (third level branches, for example). Snow just doesn't 
often stick to objects that small anyway, unless there's a huge amount 
of snow, in which case it covers everything.


But even without that you have some great work here, and some incredible 
results. I'm first in line to download the macros when you release them 
(I have a project all scoped out - actually one I've wanted to try for 
some time). :)

Keep it up!

~Mike

Tim Nikias wrote:
> So, the final version, of which I won't do another excessive test. Here we
> have 1700 spheres and 49600 cylinders in a blob, and there are still a few
> places where a cylinder pops up when it should be a sphere. This one already
> required 50 minutes. The point is that even though I could do long and
> excruciating parses with ridiculously high settings, the same effect can be
> achieved by combining a simpler, pure sphere-version with a cylinder-version
> on a less detailed structure.
> 
> OTOH, if you have an admirable piece of hardware as a CPU, the parsing times
> could drop to a level where it might be feasible doing them. But these "ifs"
> pop up everywhere: *if* the PC where much faster, I'd do some Navier Stokes
> Equations in Realtime... ;-)
> 
> Regards,
> Tim

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