Snow Animation (Maya)

Hello again.

I haven't been able to do much work due to a crazy ice storm that came out of nowhere, slapped our school district across the face, cancelling school for three whole days and leaving us with only one day of work on Friday. I've gotten kind of sick of looking at snow and ice after all of that, but I made this animation nonetheless.

Modeling the snowflakes was actually quite fun -- all we had to do was make some weird geometric polygons, mirror them to create a whole snowflake, make an army of snowflakes, extrude faces, smooth the edges, slap on a rocky bump map, and done! All the snowflakes I made either looked like rejected shurikens, weird amoebas, or something that slightly resembles a snowflake. But it was fun either way!
Next in line for modeling was a wall with a window. It was just a plane with some fancy extrusions and transparent textures to make the wall and window. Nothing more, nothing less.

Lighting was the same as usual -- three point, a nice mix of spotlight and directional for the snowflakes, and a point light to make a lamp inside the room.

Next up was animation. I took my snowflakes, resized and duplicated them, and put them above the window out of sight. Then, one-by-one, across a total 240 frames, I dragged the snowflakes down and added a slight rotation to make the animation. Some snowflakes, such as the less delicate, chunky ones and the smaller ones, fell faster than others, whereas larger snowflakes and more delicate snowflakes fell fairly slowly. Making them fall at different speeds and intervals is important, because it makes the animation feel more realistic. And while a bunch of snow falling all at once blanketing the ground with six inches instantly would be hilarious, it would also be unrealistic (and quite painful).

Not much else needed to be done after animation, aside from fixing the lights to make sure everything looked good for the final render, and compiling it all in After Effects as a JPEG sequence to make the final movie, shown below.

Overall, I think the project went well, aside from the lack of time spent working due to real-life weather and having to re-render everything after fixing the lighting, which took WAY too long to do. I'm surprised that I didn't become a skeleton before the rendering finished.

Thanks for reading, and I'm sorry that this post is kind of bare. There's not much I can say that interesting, and I'm really tired right now, so I promise that the next post will have so much intricate detail that you can and will drown in it.

-Tate