William Faucher - EasySnow

Distribution Product Discussion
1

Easy Snow allows artists to create highly-realistic snow using a Blueprint system and harnessing Niagara particles. Each snowflake is a 3D model based on real-world snow clumps, which get lit, shaded, and rendered in a realistic manner. With it, you can create heavy snowfalls, stormy blizzards, or light flurries in seconds. EasySnow is intended for rendering with the Movie Render Queue & Pathtracing. It can be used for games if tweaked accordingly (sprites can be used instead of 3D meshes for the particles), but the main focus is on maximum quality. When combined with the Movie Render Queue, EasySnow renders beautiful, falling snow that motion-blurs in a realistic way.

EasySnow also includes a Material Function to easily add and blend accumulated snowfall to all of your models in a level when connected to a Master Material (See snow on the models in the screenshots). This world snow Material Function supports Nanite Tessellation/Displacement for realistic results. It also supports snow glimmering effects, and full art direction capabilities such as controlling the amount, the falloff, and the general breakup patterns on the accumulated snow itself.Game-Ready version coming in a version update soon!

Troubleshooting:

IF you are running into displacement issues, try to set your Displacement Center value to 0 in your master material. You'll find this in the material details panel on the left. If left at default (0.5) it is possible to get odd results depending on your material.

Includes the Epic Content Examples Demo for Showcasing Purposes: http://marketplace-website-node-launcher-prod.ol.epicgames.com/ue/marketplace/en-US/product/content-examples

Disclaimer:

Reported crashes for Mac users.

Nanite Tessellation/Displacement only works on Windows/DirectX 12.

For Nanite Disaplcement to work, you need the following 2 console variables in your defaultEngine.ini file:

r.Nanite.AllowTessellation=1

r.Nanite.Tessellation=1

2 Likes
2

Absolutely Amazing Plugin! Do you happen to know why my drifts only appear when I get close to origin?
I have the easy snow set to camera centric. And the snow does follow the camera. But the drifts only appear when I am within a small distance from origin. I’m in 5.5
Oh also if I set “spawn radius” larger then the flurries appear again but there density is messed up. So something to do with the snow origin getting moved to camera but not the flurries when in camera centric mode?

3

Hi!
Thank you for the heads up, this was a bug I hadn’t caught and has been rectified! It should be ready and fixed within the day. Thanks!

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I also want to chime in and congratulate you on this amazing tool!
I do have 1 issue and 1 Question.

The issue is that the “snow size” parameter does not have a “-” but still is not adjustable when a preset is enabled. Am I doing something wrong?

The question would be if there is an easy way of adding the Niagara component to a sequence and be able to scrub though the snow and have repeatable snow patterns every time I render the shot.
That would help sooo much.

Thank you!

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hi! I’ll check the snow size parameter, that might be at typo, as Snow Size is definitely in the preset. I don’t think you’re doing anything wrong, just a mistake on my end. Will fix!

The snow should be deterministic actually, so while you won’t see the repeatability in the viewport, at runtime it should be the same time after time assuming you don’t change the warmup frames.

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Hey william, massive fan. Im curious about how UE handles the DOF on the particles. Even after temporalAAupscale=0 i still get that ugly hard edged broken unreal DOF, unlike your example renders. any tips on fixing this?