I’m working with a friend of mine on a new first person shooter in unreal engine 4 that we plan to release on steam and it’s going great, but I recently started working on a new map that takes place in a snowy mountain range and i’m having a really hard time making a decent snow texture to overlay on the rocks. I’ve been looking at the Star Wars Battlefront beta as a reference and this is the look that I want. Do you guys know of any tutorials or techniques you could share that would help? I’ve tried just using the blender texture painter but all it really does for me is just smooth the area between the rock and snow texture and it doesn’t look realistic at all. This is the rock im working with as a test. The second image is the feel im going for.
Moved from “General Forums > Blender and CG Discussions” to “Support > Materials and Textures”
Check for blender guru tutorial about dust. When you’ll lern how to put something on it, increase contrast for bw map and combine it with higher contrast noise texture using rgb mix node: set it to burn and as factor use value of 1. It’ll give you more uneven edges of your mask.
Hope you understood 
Seems to me that the biggest aspect of this “snow,” especially distant snow, is that a flat specular-color (white) is very strongly limited to what is pointing directly toward the sun, being very quickly but smoothly replaced by a dull sky-blue color when the surface’s orientation is even slightly pointed away. If a curve were used to describe this, in terms of normal-vector angle relative to the sun, the curve would have a very pronounced fall-off. I’ll bet that a bump-map would be just fine for those footprints and blow-snow.
Although, even a brief glance at this shot reveals serious scale-problems with it, unless one is to believe that those snow-prints were caused by the collapsed machine (which, if so, must be unbelievably lightweight …), and in which case the blow-snow still ruins the continuity of scale. My eye, anyway, concludes that this walker must be about the size of a garbage can.
The snow, itself, would be a second texture which is painted onto the snow-covered areas of the rocks, superseding the bare-rock texture entirely. Actually, for the most part it will probably be poured onto separate geometry which does not include the rock texture at all, since that geometry is to be “deeply snow-covered.”
(Actually, it might be that the rock(!) is what gets painted-on …)
And for most (if not all) of this particular scene, you don’t need a “fancy” rock-texture … a gray matte will do, maybe with a little bit of noise-based darkening. It won’t have sharp color-differences because it’s taking sky-reflection from the surrounding snow as well as the sky. Those rocks are “a long way off,” probably viewed through atmospheric haze which is carrying sky-color, and at this distance there are (or, should be …) no real “3D” effects at all. There will be little saturation. Only in a close-up (“oh, look at the pretty little alien flower, bravely poking its head up through the snow … [as it prepares to shoot deadly alien venom at you?]”) would there be much of a reason to make the rock actually look rocky.
For a very realistic effect, you would need more than just a snow texture mapped according to slope, you would also need to give the impression of a volume atop some of the rocks.
You could perhaps do that using Cycle’s experimental displace feature to raise the mesh atop where the snow mask would be (with the limitation that you can only use one material with no UV coordinates to work properly.