The Winter Creek
Different types of pine trees I made for the environment.
The tree log I scanned and processed using Houdini. Unfortunately it was pretty sunny during the day so the scan had some bright spots, still worked alright with some tweaks!
I wanted a nearly impassable feeling from the ground cover and ended up creating this dead and broken vegetation to create some noise and contrast the smooth snow.
For the snow shader I incorporated a Fresnel type- subsurface effect to try and get the kind of slight interior scattering you get from snow in real life. I also add small snowy sparkles from certain camera angles and distance.
My snow-gen process for the trees starts with creating the "basic" vegetation normally in SpeedTree or Maya, I then made a Network in Houdini that generates the snow buildup on the branches with parameters to adjust the clusters, size, density and geo.
I wanted to imagine a place where I could sit down and drink a warm coffee on a cold, snowy day. Which ended up becoming this piece. I incorporated some Houdini workflows to make things easier to iterate on, like the snow buildup generator on the pine trees, and also using it for photogrammetry processing. This environment is running real-time using Unreal Engine 5. Hope you enjoy!
