VFX Elements Pack 002 – Snow

I’ve been hoping to be able to shoot some snow elements this winter. I’ve not come across too many good, realistic snow elements out there. It’s easy enough to make CG snow elements but I’ve always found them a little unconvincing, especially close to camera.

Living in the American mid-west it should be easy to shoot some great snow elements, right? I was surprised how much difficulty I had getting conditions just right. The snow can’t be falling too fast or when you shoot it it just looks like noise. It can’t be too windy or your backdrop will blow around or blow away even with sandbags. It’s basically a giant sail. The light has to be decent. Luckily, this is usually the case when it snows. The entire sky turns into a giant soft-box but we only have about 8 hours that the sun is bright enough this time of year to shoot the elements and you have to hope the snow actually is falling during those hours.

Finally, all of the conditions were right and I was able to get some pretty nice foreground snow elements. With just these four plates I’ve been able to layer them in different ways with different time offsets from each other to create dozens of variations so far.

So enough talk, on to the tech specs and elements.

Download four snow elements for use adding a little depth to your winter VFX shots.

These are all 6k raw H.264s at high bit-rate of 200 mbps. So really you should notice next to no compression artifacts when working with these.  I know .braw or ProRes 4444 would be preferable but there is no way my host would let me start slinging 500 GB .zip files without cutting me off.

Screening these over footage works well since there is no alpha baked in but if you want a more naturalistic composite use these plates as a luma matte for an animated solid or try using Video Copilot’s Color Vibrance to easily create an alpha for these elements.

Snow_C_steady_001

Snow_D_steady_001

Snow_E_steady_001

Snow_F_Steady_001

Download the Element pack here

Some of you probably noticed that these elements do not start at A. Could that mean I have more snow coming I just thought this was a good starting collection? That could be!

Use these elements in any way you see fit for either personal, academic or commercial projects. Credit is not required but it’s always nice! If you are going to give credit please do so like this:

Elements provided by
Mighty North LLC

There are 2 restrictions to this license:

You cannot resell these elements on their own or part of a package of elements or stock footage. You can give them to others provided you acknowledge where you downloaded them from (here).

You cannot sell a derivative work that is not substantially different than these elements. I.E. You cannot sell prints of these elements by themselves. Is that something someone would really want anyway? You can however sell derivative works that are substantially different wherein these elements are a portion or even prominently featured.

If you end up using these and would like to share how you’ve used them, please do so! Leave a link in the comments below.  Let me know if you find this sort of thing useful.