How do you make realistic snow in 2022? SnowFlow is no longer being developed.

[Jon Berntsen]

Hi! 

We used to rely on the SnowFlow plugin for making snow. Now that it's no longer being developed, we need to start looking for other options. Any tips?
Could use the good old SnowFlow-script, but it's not as good and stable as the plugins was.
 

[Nicolai Bongard]

If you are talking about covering "small objects" like a bench or a car or something with snow, i would maybe go for Forest pack if you have access to it (scatter some spheres of different sizes), or perhaps a particle based workflow with Tyflow or the native particle system of 3ds max. Depends a bit on how much of a closeup you need. I imagine creating a preset with tyflow would work well if you have lots of assets.

An alternative that may work for some assets is go to top view, select faces by angle (no backfaces, so you only get the topfacing faces.), detach copy, shell, turbosmooth and noise) to create some snow. If this fails, or you are having trouble selecting the faces you want, you could try going by the way of the Data Channel modifier to get your selection. (Data channel could also be used to create a mask for texture blending, for example by generating vertex colors you could use as a mix in a blend material)

You could also create a dense plane that covers your object from the top view, then use the conform tool to align vertices onto your object beneath, delete faces you dont need, apply turbosmooth if needed to increase the vertex-count and then create a blobmesh. Warning, the native blobmesh is rather slow in my experience.

A hybrid way of doing things, like use the forest pack to distribute a simple plane object as dense as you like, then convert the scattered objects back to editable geometry and use that to drive the blobmesh creation.

For more distant objects you could try using a blend material with falloff (with some noise and whatnot for extra fancyness) to blend between the original material and the snow material, or you could duplicate your geometry and add a push modifier, give the new bigger object a snow material but use the falloff as an opacity to reveal the original object beneath.