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I haven't tried it, but making a map for some channel on the windcreen material could at least produce the effect of wipers having been used - Probably doesn't work as a cutout mask for the opacity, but maybe on some other channel.
Apparently it has been snowing all this time in between renders... You be careful, or you'll be needing a plow soon
It looks nice ,Jaime Great winter night s scene
I do my lens flare in Photoshop in post work, using non destructive layer method it gives a pretty good effect. and very editable
Artistically I like this one the best and would make it really pop if you made the image a bluer tone (tone mapping) and had the lights emitting a more yellow tone. The headlights being emissive with maybe a little fog effect I think would look awesome. Also maybe a bit more contrast which you can do in tone mapping and playing with gamma.
Add blue light.
I have never seen a blue moon or sun for that matter :)
In Blender, after enabling the Snow Addon.
The key shortcuts I give aren't custom, but may have changed recently.
Select the Cube (default scene item) and delete. (X)
Add a Plane (first image).
Second image -
1)
Edit Mode: Tab (with plane selected). 1, 2 & 3 switch between Vertex, Line and Face for selection and manipulation.
Extrude (E) and Add Loop Cuts (Ctrl R) to get the shape you want.
2)
Either select faces or not, and click Add Snow.
(If you want snow just on the selected faces then check the Selected Faces option.)
3)
After a second or two, the snow appears, either covering the whole plane area, or where the faces you selected are.
4)
Edit model again.
Select faces, verts or lines and move them about.
I have Right Click to select - you may have it as Left.
G will grab.
O enables Proportional Editing; there are various options for this tool that make using it very versatile, but the default works fine here.
Scroll wheel will increase the area of affect - think of Proportional Editing being like Mesh Grabber in Studio if you have it - but far more versatile.
Once you have something you like...
5)
Exit Edit mode and you will something similar (perhaps) to my quick attempt.
6)
Export as an Obj (File > Export > Wavefront .obj). You don't actually have to exit Edit mode to export; there is a caveat, however, if for some reason the plane isn't selected and you export with the option to export selected, then you get what is selected, or nothing.
Those are my options when eporting for Studio.
Third image shows what I import as; note the percentage.
Is the building front on the right side important?
Visually, your eyes are being pulled to the space between the car and the right back corner wall. All the light colored strong vertical lines on the right side, the dark crack line of the sidewalk, and the sweeping lines of the background buildings floor/stories, move your eye up and to the right. Basically, everyting in the visual story is pointing towards the one spot without snow between floors of the building on the right.
If you crop out half the sidewalk to the wall, a bit of the foreground to where the shadow meets the street on the bottom right, and keep the same aspect ratio by dopping the top to just above the 2nd floor of the builing in the background, it REALLY changes the feeling/focus/mood.
Your eyes now lock in to the driver and passenger... it is no longer about a car in the snow, but "what are these mysterious people doing out on the road a such an hour in these conditions...
Lastly , I would darken the reflection on the back of the rear view mirror so that it doesn't compete with the light on the faces, and maybe cut back the light on the driver's face just a tad
Your mileage may vary...
The way I saw it was she was being picked up by the Chaufeur when she came out of the building on the right :)
Well... I am not an expert... but
cropped and rearview mirror darkened
> I have never seen a blue moon or sun for that matter :)
Then you haven't been observing very well. All the colors are in sunlight, reflections from snow tend toward blue.
Depends on the light but the blue is the refraction of light through the snow because it is water and water looks blue because the red is absorbed. The light from the Moon, if at night, has a Temperature of 4500, I've looked it up a while ago, and is not blue the sun has a Temperature of 5500 to 6500 depending on several factors, so is also not blue. Snow is actually the brightest white in nature at RGB 255,250,250 and most artists use an off white for it and add other colours to tint the snow blue. The Blue we see is actually the snow refracting light to appear blue so to achieve that Refraction of the snow should be used not a blue or any other colour of light only the right colour for the Moon or Sun. If you think the way to go is to add a blue light then carry on but don't use Refraction on the snow.
Many thanks for weighing in, all! Will respond in posts per input:
Re the blue for night scene
D'oh
It is a cinematic convention to make night scenes blueish; I'd completely forgotten about that. @Wonderland thanks for the tip about tone mapping Alicia; here's the test on that:
Also made it less snowy; for some reason the snowfall also comes out yellow; that may be from the headlights as the lamps in the background don't have that tint (they now emit white light instead of the original yellowish, though) possibly as a result of changing the white point, which was what I did to give the scene a blue-ish tone.
This render is also tweaked, as seen in the next post.
- Jaime
@Ivy Thanks for the tip! I did try it in my PS CS5 although for some reason the flare wasn't that noticable when using it as a separate layer (added to 50% grey bg, then blended with overlay). I did get better results when adding it directly to the layer (which I duplicated for safety) .
With Movie prime lens flare
With 50-300 zoom lens flare
@nicstt Thanks for the walkthrough; I did look at some videos of the Snow Add-on but for some reason after enabling it didn't appear in 2.9.2 like it should have. After multiple attempts and sleeping on it I was able to enable it in 2.9.0 and when I checked it in 2.9.2 it was finally there. Not sure if there's a conflict between the 2 versions; will probably remove 2.9.0 to avoid conflicts. Am also thinking of using particle snow from Blender for better snowfall.
@PerttiA I tried other maps in different channels for the windscreen but am less than enthused with the result; am no longer satisfied with the snowfall on the vehicle. Think I can get what I need from Blender for the snow on the car and windscreen as well as the snowfall.
While I'm moving towards more snow in the scene I definitely don't want to go this far https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZQdczprpJk
Great input, Sandy; she's actually headed to some place. Will keep what you said in mind when doing previous and succeeding panels
- Jaime
Something like this, @Chumly?
Looks cool to me!
Your snow in front of the car with the tracks and crumbs etc looks amazing.
With your cropping (better than mine) you really are giving the impression of movement (which is what I think you wanted). With the car centered or on the left, it conveys a stopped car (which is why Fishtales probably thought it was "in the process" of picking someone up and stopped)
you've really come a long way from the original
The only improvement (which I don't know how to make) would be to darken the snowflakes that are not in the headlight beam
Thanks @Chumly, that section is made up of 3 parts (out of the 70 and a bit) from the Easy Snow Kitbash Pack 3D over at Turbosquid, which is currently on sale ( 6 days left as of this writing). I managed to get it on sale last week and the current sale price is about what I got it for ( albeit a few cents cheaper). No buyer's remorse: it's dead useful for snow exteriors. I applied the shader preset from AM's Materia MeshMaker to the snow and am really happy with the way it turned out
Have been experimenting; it does make sense that the snowfall in the headlight beam is very visible- rain and smoke only show up on film when they pass through a medium (like llight), which is why then tend to be backlit and at an angle. I guess snow is the same.
Gave it a test:
Added another lens flare to the second lamppost behind the trees.
The snow is flinks snowfall from Rendo and doresn't show up in Iray. The one in front of the headlights is part of an earlier effort and the settings were tweaked to bring it in line with the Snow System from KindredArts Iray Blizzard. That snow is very visable and the prop is also very large. Flinks is smaller, which made it ideal for putting it in the headlights and in the background. I will probably add snow in the section between the hood and windscreen and another one on the roof of the car: that way the snow won't be coming through the vehicle like the Snow System and Materia Meshmaker.
Some thing to consider as you change the snowfall: the heaviness of the falling snow will affect what the car should look like. The car is giving off enough heat that the snow will melt if it's a lighter snowfall. In that case, the car should look wet, not snowy. It will only build on the car if it falls faster and heavier than the car can melt it. If you add sheets of snow to the car, it should be shaped like the hood or the top, but smaller, like there's a clean border around the edge, but if that sheet is thin. The thicker the sheet, the less you're going to see that border.
If you're looking for realism, you have to settle on a lot of specific details because for all the suggestions, the snow will look different depending on a lot of factors. How long has it been snowing? Is this a first snowfall, or is it building on a previous snow event? How heavy is the snowfall? Is it a dry snow or a wet snow? Powder behaves very differently from wet snow. How long has the car been sitting there? Is it stored inside a garage when not in use? How much traffic is the road getting at the time? Traffic warms a road and that affects accumulation. What's the outside temperature? If it's close enough to freezing or it's been warm before the strom came in, the ground could be warm enough to melt the snow early in the event.
Wow! Thanks for all the input @jjmainor; it's a big help. Will think about the snow; for now here are the things that I do have answers for:
Other things like the snow and temperature I will need to figure out. As mentioned in the first post I live in a tropical country and aside from foggy childhood memories and a visit to Sapporo pre-pandemic, have no experience with snow so am asking for advice, looking at pictures and watching cheesy Christmas movies/ movies set in a urban snowy environment for reference.
Hope you had a Merry Christmas or Happy Hanukkah if you celebrate either and that you're enjoying this Yule Season. This is the first Christmas since Mum passed last July and Christmas eve was... different, as might be expected.
Here's to a better year ahead, hopefully!
-Jaime