Snow effect with particle playground looks lame :-(

[Kevin Camp]

particle playground wouldn’t be my first choice for realistic snow… being a 2d system limits it (as you are finding).

you should be able to use property mappers to affect both the size and speed of the particles, which would help to create the illusion of depth, but i can’t think of a way to add blur to that (there’s no blur in the effect settings).

to fake dof, i think you’ll need to create snow on different layers (i’d plan on three layers, foreground, middle ground and background), varying the size and speed of the particles. then add a blur effect to the layers that need to be blurred due to dof.

there are particle systems like trapcode particular that are 3d systems and have dof built into the effect (you might try the trial version). after effects is bundled with particle world, wichi is 3d, but doesn’t support dof (at least not in my ancient version of ae).

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

i should also add that you may be able to accomplish the faux dof method more easily with the snow effect on three layers and blur accordingly, but you’ll learn more using particle playground…. even if all you learn is how hard particle playground is to use…

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

i should have looked at your sample first… since the camera is moving, the snow movement is likely more towards the camera and slightly falling, so 3 layers really doesn’t make for this.

let me think about this for a bit… i’m thinking you might be able to create a system to use as a depth matte for lens blur….

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Richard Garabedain]

Playground? Why not particle World? which has the depth your looking for. not to mention a texture option, and a floor option.

[Kevin Camp]

yep, i think particle world would be a better way to go. it won’t give you depth of field, but being a 3d particle system will give you 3d depth, and will be easier to use and faster to render….

try something like this to get the particles to look like they are falling and moving towards the frame of view:

set grid to off

particle:
particle type = faded sphere
birthsize = 0.01
death size = 0.1
birth color and death color = white

physics settings:
animation = direction axis
gravity = -0.1

producer settings:
position y = -0.25
radius z = 0.5

camera settings:
rot x = 20
rot y = 90

i think that would get you close. again, no depth of field, but much more realistic than particle playground.

you can also enable motion blur (on both the layer and preview)

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[David Honan]

HI Kev & thanks for taking a look into how to use particle playground to create snow effects. I’m going to have another crack soon and will update how i got on.

Being a rookie I’m hoping by bashing around with particle playground (Or Particle World as suggested) something good will happen!

Grazie mille 🙂

[David Honan]

Hey thanks Richard for this suggestion I’ll take a look at this soon and will post progress here 🙂

Ciao David

[Matthew Keane]

By coincidence somebody just tweeted a link to this tutorial about making realistic snow:
https://vimeo.com/112816993

It uses Particular, but if you don’t have access to that plug-in, I guess the techniques for camera tracking and moving the particles around could still be useful.