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title: "Creating Snow with VRayStochasticFlakesMtl"
canonical: "https://documentation.chaos.com/space/VMAX/113575509/Creating%20Snow%20with%20VRayStochasticFlakesMtl"
format: markdown
---
This page provides a tutorial for using VRayStochasticFlakesMtl. Overview This tutorial explains how to use the VRayStochasticFlakesMtl for creating a glittering snow material. Want to follow along but don’t have a license? Tutorial Assets To download the scene used in this tutorial, click on the button below. Tutorial Steps In this tutorial, we use a VRayFastSSS2 material to scatter some light inside our snow. Then we blend a VRayStochasticFlakesMtl on top of it to achieve the glittering look of snow using a VRayBlendMtl. The VRayStochasticFlakesMtl is used as a coat in a VRayBlendMtl for achieving a mirror-like reflective result. It can also be used as a base material, when the desired effect needs to be more diffuse. We use the flakes as a coat to add glitter to our snow material. Part I: Creating subsurface scattering with VRayFastSSS2 1. Start by opening the Material Editor and creating a VRayFastSSS2 material. Change its name to  Snow . 2. Create a VRayBlendMtl material and name it  Blend . 3. Connect the  Snow  to the Base of the  Blend  material. 4. Select the  Snow  material and change the  Sub surface color  to a light blue (R233,G252, B255). 5. Change the  Scatter color  to white (R255,G255, B255). 6. Change the  Phase function  value to 0.7. 7. Assign the VRayBlendMtl to the geometry and make a test render. The snow already looks good, but there's no glitter. Part II: Creating a glittering coat with VRayStochasticFlakesMtl 8. Create a VRayStochasticFlakesMtl and name it  Flakes . 9. Connect the  Flakes   material to the  Coat 1  slot of the VRayBlendMtl. Now that all the materials are created and connected, we can adjust the  Flakes . 10. Adjust the  number of flakes . There is no perfect value. Some experiments are usually required to achieve a good result. In this case, for the ground plane, a value of  30 000  works well. A value of around 3 000 is used for the snowman. 11. Adjust the  Highlight glossiness  to make the highlights more blurry (or glossy). A value of  0.4  works well for this scene. 12. Set the  Blur angle  to  0.3 . This makes the flakes look a bit less sharp. 13. Change the  Reflection filter   color  to tint the reflections. For this tutorial, we've used a dark grey color (R30, G30, B30). 14. Change the  Mapping type  to  Explicit UVW channel  if the geometry has proper UVW mapping. Alternatively, you can also use Triplanar from object XYZ. Note: In this scene, a flake scale of 1.0 can be used with Explicit UVW channel or 0.01 with Triplanar from object XYZ. 15. Render the final image. Notes The VFB lens effects tools are used in the final render to make the snow highlights look like they're sparkling. We've used the  Glare effect  with a weight of 100 and a size of 8 with the  intensity mask  set to 1. The scene is illuminated by a VRaySun and VRaySky. The ground plane is a simple deformed plane with dimensions of 1000 m by 1000 m.