EasySnow

EasySnow is your go-to tool for creating highly-realistic snow particle, and material effects.

EasySnow 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.

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.

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

Technical Details

Features:

• Create realistic, fully dynamic, and customizeable snowfall effects in seconds.
• Built-in LOD system for improved performance, and gives you a plethora of controls to get exactly the result you have in mind.
• A selection of presets to get you started (i.e. Light Snow, Heavy Snow, Flurries, etc)
• Includes a World Snow Material Function to add and blend accumulated snowfall on your models.
• Full control over the look, movement, speed, patterns, and material of the snowflakes and snow material.
• Can place snow emitters locally, or snow can follow the position of the camera.
• Includes a Masking Blueprint to mask out unwanted snowy areas (World Snow Material Function), and supports Vertex Painting on models as a mask as well (blue channel)

Disclaimer:

Crashes reported for MacOS 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

This product supports Lumen for Unreal Engine 5.0+

https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/lumen-global-illumination-and-reflections-in-unreal-engine?application_version=5.0

Number of Blueprints: 2

Number of Unique Materials and Material Instances: 3

Number of Textures: 13

Texture Resolutions: 4096x4096, 512x512, 128x128

Supported Development Platforms: Windows

Windows: Yes

Linux: Not Tested

Mac: Not Tested

Documentation: In Progress

Important/Additional Notes: Nanite Tessellation/Displacement only works on Windows/DirectX 12.