Is Snow Rendering Necessary?

Just because you can do something, should you?

It’s a question I have been pondering as I have seen a few renders pop up here and there with snow or rain effects added. What is the purpose of this other than the obligatory “Look what I can do, mom!” I’ve even tested it out a bit with the quick and easy visualization capabilities of Lumion (as you can see in the above image).

The tricky part of mixing weather with visualization is that you don’t want to do anything unnecessary that will distract from the overall design.

I once had a police car as part of my model, waiting to get onto the main highway. To me it felt like I was adding variety but when the project manager saw it he immediately said “No way!” and explained that the client would only see it as a cop car waiting to give someone a ticket- not exactly the best approach when you are looking for public support on a project. While it might have been a very real scenario, it distracted too much and I quickly removed it.

So it is with rain, snow or even wind effects. If they aren’t explicitly supposed to be there, why would you add them? I’m sure there are several cases where you would want to add weather, especially snow in the case of a ski lodge or snowy mountain project, but this will likely be the exception to the rule.

In short, as fun as it is to play with weather effects in visualization, very few projects will actually warrant it. It’s probably best to just assume no unless the client or project manager specifically says that it is needed.

While this post isn’t intended to explain how to add weather to a render, I will just quickly point you in two directions in case you want to test it out. The first is just to know that 3ds Max can do all sorts of things with a number of third party plugins, including this plugin created for snow effects.

The other is that if you are keen to trying out Lumion, there are some cool wind, rain and snow effects ready for you when you go to the render screen. Just click on the starry button in the top left and you will see what  I mean. Snow rendering is at least fun to try if nothing else!

Let us know below- weather in render… good or bad?