So it’s time to add snow to the scene. This has not been going entirely as planned.
First off, I thought I had a snow texture already built into 3DS Max. I didn’t find it. It might be there, I didn’t find it. I considered using some texture from a picture I took of February’s snow storm that pretty much closed the southeast for 2 days. But decided not to in favor of trying to come up with something using the built in materials. It took some time and a bit of fiddling with settings.
Getting the look I want hasn’t been that easy either. I got it on the ground by creating a plane and with enough subdivisions to allow me to deform it so it looks like uneven ground. So that wasn’t so bad. It was getting it on the Christmas tree that was a challenge. And I’m still working on it.
At first I tried using a cone since the tree is basically a cone shape. It was a good idea and could have worked. It would have required a bit more adjusting of things, though as it is I still have quite a bit of adjusting. I found that a sphere worked better. It starts off rounded so I get a bit of that fluff look to start with. When I tried the cone I only used 8 segments and that wasn’t really enough to get some good droops of snow. So when I tried the sphere,
the first time I used 24 segments, the same number as in the tree. That, as you can see was not really that great. It actually allowed for too much detail and would be very tedious to clean up.
I did try it. I figured I might as well check that what I wanted to do was going to work well. So I cut off the bottom half of the sphere, since I wasn’t going to need it. I selected the very bottom edge and scaled it in so that it would help to provide some depth when I extruded the polygons above it. I used the same extrude method I did on the tree so that I extruded it by polygon to create the differentiation for the branches. Then I transformed them down into place. But it wasn’t quite that simple as I did the extrude twice to give me two segments to work with. That made the transform a little bit more involved.
With the branches in place I started to deform them by moving edges and sometimes entire faces to make them shorter or to make them a bit rounder looking. Then I would apply turbosmooth to check to see if it was looking the way I hoped. I don’t really like working with the isoline display. I get too many edges and get confused, so once I check for the look then I drop the turbosmooth modifier and go about my business.
As you can see, with 24 segments, it’s going to be really involved and not look quite right. But the idea is there and that’s the important bit.
I deleted the partial sphere and created a new sphere, this time with 16 segments. This has turned out to work out much better. I went through the same process as before, delete most of the bottom half of the sphere, scale the bottom edge in to create a lip, extrude the now, last row of faces using the by polygon method and then a second extrude. Once the extrusions were transformed down instead of sticking straight up in the air, I started really shaping everything.
Since the top was round and everything was very round I had to adjust each edge around and move it a bit to make it look a bit more cone like. While I didn’t want the flatness of the cone, it is still the basic shape I am dealing with here so I did make the snow a bit more cone shaped. This did take a bit to get right. Sometimes I just had to move the edge (really, it’s an edge loop) up or down some, at other times I had to do a little scaling to get it right. At this point it’s a matter of adjusting the arm sort of things sticking out so that they are closer into the body of the partial sphere as well as making them look more like the had slid down and created natural droops of snow. Sometimes this required the very end polygon be removed to take the arm back to just one segment instead of two. Some of the arms have had to be eliminated completely which helped to create a nice sort of indentation or transitioning area to move into the next droop.
As I got segments of the droopy areas complete, I added the turbosmooth modifier to see how things would look. When I did this I bumped up the smoothing to 3 times as smooth. That really made a big difference in how it looked. It also showed where the snow wasn’t always sitting on the tree, it was sticking up from it a bit, defying gravity. To make this look right I selected the underside polygons and transformed them down into the tree a bit. In some cases I had to make the transforms by selecting one edge, making the adjustment and then selecting the next edge.
As you can tell, doing the snow, is a process that is requiring some patience and 
persistence. Fortunately, once I have one set of the snow done, then I can copy it and transform its position down so that it is in position for the next level of branches, then I have to scale it in all the right directions and rotate it so that it doesn’t all look the same on every level. At the point I got enough of the top snow done I tested this idea for starting the next level down and it looks like it is going to work pretty good.
I have mostly finished the very top level of snow. I do have one bit to adjust. I have started 
on the second level down. I’ve got it in place and mostly sized right. I went in and deleted most of the central faces that are not going to be seen. No sense rendering them if they won’t ever be visible. Here you can see where I have that top part done and have started on the second level of snow. You can easily see in this where there snow is not sitting properly on the tree on that second level down.
Now to get the snow finished and do something about the other two trees. They do need a little dressing up I think.