Snow And Foot Prints

[bastardloud]

Oi!,

I'm building a scene where the character walk around a room where it's snowing inside. When the snow builds up enough I want his foot prints to start makeing foot prints. I though of useing a surface with good textures but I won't allow me to show the progression of built up snow. I wanted to use particles.

-Any ideas

thanx

[drblacksnake]

well.. perhaps animated seequence for displacement map would be a better choice. also You can use (at least I would) blendshapes.
use particles for snowfall only.

[freman]

If you could let me know how the snow thing works out id be a happy man. trying to do the same thing with dust. but can seem to figure out a good way to do it.

maybe the snow approch is a good way to start.

senserly thanks

Freman

[bubbafrye]

hello.. I am still fairly novice when working with dynamics, but here is my two cents.

You have 2 porblems that I am seeing, first you want footprints. Second, it sounds like you are wanting the level of snow on your ground plane to rise. Attempting to acieve goal 2 with particles seems very 'computaionally heavy'. I agree with the earlier post that suggested using particles to simulate snowfall only.

so for problem one (snow on floor):

Try taking a nurbs plane with a decent snow texture and placing it below your floor plane.

--You could either deform it with an artisan tool first, then just translate it up thru the floor, to imply a rising level...

--Or scatter some isolated turbulance fields underneath and run a simulation that bubbles it up. -- perhaps a combo of both would be most efficient.

for problem two (footprints):

Convert your same nurbs plane floor to a soft body, then build an object the size/shape of your footprint. select you soft-body floor, and then the 'footprint-maker' and hit Particles->Make Collide.

If that works OK in your tests, bind the footprint-maker to your charater.

--Just ideas, hope they help. If anything, someone who knows a little more about this than I, can tighten up my instructions a bit.

[bflat]

Could be good idea to use softBody simulation for footprints, but it not be very fast if your guy is walking around quite a lot.

My opinion is that the displacement map solution might be a good one.

[marcofalsitta]

yes displacement map is a good idea ...
did it recently and it works extremly well.
you can as well build automatically the disp maps
using depths maps (i'll let you figure out this part )