So the month flied ultra quickly with Christmas and all… I spent so much time on this sketch and yet after all the remakes I believe I will not be able to finish it in time. I am sharing what progress I had but the effect is quite unfinished. The idea was to make a person shooting a gun spraying it’s targets with snow and seriously - I could not find proper stylized SNOW vfx references anywhere, only ice spikes and blocks and snowflakes
The main time-eater was the materials for me, I wanted to try something out with dithered opacity, lighting direction inputs, but it still won’t work for me. Overall it still looks vulgar, like fizzy drink erupting or some insulation foam…
Let me do something… It’s nothing too fancy and quite untidy but i will post in a moment.
So I apologise again for the materials’ tidiness it is all in research phase and very cluttered, parameters unnamed etc.
The effect is made of 5 emitters, but if i were to continued doing it, I would probably split it into 2 systems - one for the stream and one for the snow piles.
After trying out many variants I decided to use blobby icosphere mesh emitter with erosion over time to serve as a main body of the stream, supported by 2D sprites, also with erosions and more translucency to create “lighter” snow. It seemed to me, that 3d meshes create nice shadows that cast down on the snowy surroundings (or piles in this case).
A ribbon is added just for more cohesiveness and shape control - just a few textures panning over each other. And another sprite emitter for snowflakes.
And finally the snow piles - blobs of meshes with some world position offset and slight dithered opacity ant contact with surface points, to make it slightly softer.
I dunno if this helps… again - it’s very untidy and I don’t want to allocate time to fixing this now, but I will definitely revisit the effect some time later.
