Hi all,

So yesterday I decided to do some experimenting with the Principled Shader. I decided to give myself 60 minutes to come up with a plausible snow shader. The 60 minutes included looking at reference materials and including a final test render. Here's what I ended up with. There's lots of room for improving the shader but as said, I tried to stick to the aforementioned rule of 60 minutes. It actually surprised me how quick I got a simple snow material slapped together which gave me a bit more room to tinker with it.

I always enjoy and appreciate any feedback from the Houdini community. Feel free to comment! Should you have any questions regarding this shader study, or anything else, let me know!

WoW, this looks great! Nice displacement.
How did you go about creating the specs/flakes?

Aslak K-S
WoW, this looks great! Nice displacement.
How did you go about creating the specs/flakes?

I used a turbulent noise with high frequency on the specular roughness channel combined with an additional high frequency turbulent noise on the displacement.

Hi, I'm new to Houdini shading, may I ask how to make those shiny white points ? I used your tips on frequency on roughness, but it left me no specular but only surface displacement. It would be great if you could share some ideas of how to make white points. Thank you!

Very nice! Looks really good, you did a great job with this.

For improving it even more you could add some sort of microdisplacement like in this example [hasenjager.cgsociety.org]. Update us if you make some more progress

VivianNie
Hi, I'm new to Houdini shading, may I ask how to make those shiny white points ? I used your tips on frequency on roughness, but it left me no specular but only surface displacement. It would be great if you could share some ideas of how to make white points. Thank you!

Here is a quick example on how to create some flakes/shiny points. Is basically just adding an extra layer of reflection on top of the main material and multiplying an high frequency noise.
Another way would be to adding a noise to the normals of the surface at rendering time