Let it snow!

[SMMDigital]

I've seen something about this before, but I cannot remember where...

Usually, in order to get snow on a building, I simply make up a duplicate of a texture, paint the roof parts white, and rename the texture with a _WI suffix. This makes a nice flat snow effect on the roof. But I want to simulate six or so inches of snow on the top of a building. I know that you can make objects appear only at night by using the fx_night heirarchy. Is there one for winter or snow?

[spec5sx]

From a naming standpoint I don't think it's doable. What I would do (from a 3Ds Max perspective) is create a separate snow build-up model for my house (or whatever) and create two textures for it. The primary texture would be transparent (simple texture, black alpha channel). The winter texture would be normal. That way the snow build up model would be invisible in the game, except in winter.

[g_nash]

From Gray .... http://railsimilarity.blogspot.com/2009 ... tures.html

Looks good , read the blog to see what else you can do .. expand on the ideas presented and imagine .. much is possible

[Kali]

You could just model the top of the snow as a plane 6" above the building... and well, go look up voxels, they're a way of making a 3d surface with layers of 2d textures. Not sure how well the RW engine copes with layers of transparency mind you.

[SMMDigital]

Transparent snow layer... i should have thought of that sooner. Very simple, and the results look great. The way it was done was to select the top faces of the roof and duplicate them just a hair above the regular roof. I then extruded the snow planes by 6 inches and painted them with a snow texture that had a default texture with alpha transparency and winter texture with no transparency.
I thought about getting fancy with the snow pack and chamfering the corners for a rounded appearance, but I didn't want to add any more polygons to an already heavy model.