iToo Software: Making it Snow with Forest Pack

In this special seasonal installment of our regular tips and tricks episodes, we're going to look at a rather unusual use for Forest Pack – adding snow to trees. It might not be the obvious choice of plugin for this task – after all snow normally forms a continuous blanket-like mesh, and Forest Pack scatters hundreds of thousands of individual objects – but when coupled with a metaballs plugin, Forest Pack can be used to add a covering of snow to high polygon objects really quickly.

In this tutorial we'll examine two techniques for adding realistic snow to a tree, starting with covering only the branches that are visible to the sky and not obstructed by one another. We'll then build upon these foundations to add a denser coating of snow by covering all the tree's upwards facing polygons. Finally we'll use our new snow covered tree assets to populate the small environment shown above.

iToo Software Forest Pack – 25% Off

Forest Pack is the world’s most popular scattering plugin for 3ds Max®. It provides a complete solution for creating vast areas of objects, from trees and plants to buildings, crowds, aggregates, ground-cover, rocks and more. If you can model it, Forest Pack can scatter it.

Forest Pack, RailClone and the Bundle are all 25% off, now thru April 13, 2018.

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