Making Snow in Maya 2010by Niklas Brandin Web: labs.ravenproduktion.se


6. Now press play on the timeline, and let it play about 25 frames. It should be looking something like the picture below.


7. Now select Modify > Convert > nParticle to Polygons. Select the nParticles again, and go to the Output mesh-tab. Play with the settings, until you get a good mesh.



8. Open the outliner once again, and select the snow mesh and delete its history. Then delete the particle-system and the extra faces you duplicated in the first step. You can also unhide your original mesh. We are now ready to begin with the lightning and shading.




9. Create an arealight, and set the intensity to 35000 and decay rate to Quadric. Check “Use Ray Trace Shadows”, and check “Use Light Shape”. Then duplicate your arealight two times, and place the 3 lights around your object as on the picture. Press 7 on the keyboard, and you will see how the light behaves. You may want to lower the intensity on the back and frontlight to get a higher contrast. The value on the intensity is depending on the scale of your scene, so you will have to play with this to get the result you want.



Open the render settings, and choose Mental Ray as renderer. Set the “Max Sample Level” to 1, and the Anti-aliasing Contrast to 0.05. Check the” Jitter” and “Sample Lock” checkboxes. It is a little dark right now, and we will correct it with a gamma correction. Open the render settings again, and at the bottom of in the quality tab, change the Gamma value under Framebuffer to 0.455.