To be exact, I’m trying to soften snow at intersection with tree (so edge is more fluffy). DepthFade node unfortunately works only with translucent materials. I could use the blending for other areas as well, such as blending of flat plane with sculpted hill/mountain. There are few examples that would benefit from blending:
You could also just vertex paint some snow at the base of your walls. But for that you need a decent amount of vertices on your wall meshes. Here’s a tutorial : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6O4AgSwTmQ
that’s pretty much what he’s doing. just that hes using the same texture for both of the intersecting meshes and projecting it viah world position with the same tiling so it always matches up perfectly. might work for the tree, won’t work for the wall as it is probably straight down and the projected texture won’t have anything to be projected onto nicely.
you could look into using decals for the wall but vertex painting in a snow texture like suggested could get you a fair bit of the way. add some filler props to cover up more of the edge and it may just be good enough x.x
You could try to use DistanceToClosest surface node and raise snow field when its inside of mesh(tree or wall). This way snow feel more natural as it clumps where there are some wind cover.
Thanks guys! I’ve tried vertex paint, and as said, it requires to be vertex-dense to be precise. I’ve tried on low poly rocks and unfortunately it wasn’t nowhere near precision. Maybe I tested it too briefly, should test it again. At worst, I could paint some effect typical for snow-concrete contact (either gap or wet/frozen surface). But it’s good only for small numbers of objects and it’s not really elastic workflow (can’t add more concrete houses or move them without re-painting).
Jenny, thanks, sounds good, I’ll try to bump the intersecting snow via strong normal/tesselation. Could be elegant improvement
If it’s a arch-viz scene you can probably afford the extra geometry on the walls. If it’s a game, probably better not going that route!
check out this tutorial serie about vertex painting…the guy use some technique like tessalation/world displacement for one of his painted material, like the dirt. This method could work well to make snow on objects. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKaBj1TBE-s
If you can afford the extra draw calls, try this method. (definitely not a fool-proof solution. just an idea)
For example, rock mesh placed on snow.
In the rock material, use the depth fade node as the alpha of a lerp between rock texture and snow texture.
In the material instance you can play with the opacity and fadeDistance values to have the snow texture applied wherever the rock intersects with the ground.
Depth Fade node available only for materials with enabled translucent shading, such as water, so it doesn’t work for rock material. Unless Epic changed it in recent patches. (it wasn’t available in at least 4.9.0)
