Tuesday, November 26th, 2013 Posted by Jim Thacker

See Disney’s snow simulation system recreated in Blender

Regular readers may remember that last week, we posted a story on Disney’s material point method for snow simulation, as used on its new animated feature, Frozen.

Developer and Ubisoft lighting artist Jean-François ‘PyroEvil’ Gallant evidently saw the same video, since his latest tech demo recreates the snowball sequence using Molecular, his Blender multiphysics add-on.

While the results won’t exactly give Disney sleepless nights (at least, not unless Frozen is rendered using really big particles), they do reproduce the physical behaviour of wet snow surprisingly accurately.

BlenderNation reports that the simulation, which uses 400,000 particles, took 96 seconds per frame to simulate and four minutes per frame to render.

Download Molecular from Jean-François Gallant’s website