Now that winter is here and the holidays are over I thought it might be fun to make a little snow inside while I watched in snow outside. This tutorial is a good one because you can adapt it to other uses besides snow. A rock slide comes to mind or anything you may need some custom particle emitter to spew out. And for you windows fan I did this one on my windows box.

Okay first the first thing I did was made a snow flake (sort of) in Illustrator. Then I saved it as a .pdf (acrobat) file. That is one of the coolest import features of the new Strata CX.

Now Import the .pdf file into Strata. This is how it should look once you import the .pdf into Strata CX.

Now click on the Shapes tab in the resource window and you will see that the .pdf has been imported in as a shape.

Okay, now make a texture for you snow flake shape. Click on the "Textures" tab in the resource window and click on the "New" button and select "Image Texture".

Now you can make your texture. You can use the settings I used for mine below or make your own.

BEFORE you apply the texture you just made to the snow flake you will need to open the shape instance. The way to do that is to double click the snow flake in the big project window. A new window will pop up and then you can apply the texture. When you are done simply click on the X (windows) or the red close window button (MAC).

This is how I applied my texture to the snow flake.

One of the great things about shapes is that you can save them to use in another project. In the "shapes" tab select the snow flake shape and the click on the + in the top right corner and select "save..." Now you can load this into any other strata file. Tip: Make a directory inside your strata resource folder for all of your custom shapes and they will show up in the preview pain at the bottom of the shapes tab.

Okay, now delete the snow flake from the main project window. Place a sphere primitive in it's place. With the sphere selected go to "selection" then "Make Construction". This will make the sphere invisible when you render the scene. You can see it in working view but the camera won't render it.

Now select the "FX" tab in the resource window and click on the "new" button at the top left. From there select "Fountain" from the drop down.

With the new fountain dialogue open select the shapes button, it may be grayed out but it works anyway. Now you can select the snow flake shape that pops up in the menu. This will make your snow flake the particle that the emitter will use instead of the little sphere that is the default.

Here is my final settings. I think my particle size may be to big but I will play with it some more later. Play around with the settings and see how they look.

Now put the new custom fountain you made onto the sphere that you made into a construction object. You can save this as a shape too and save your computer some resources when you use more than one of these.

Here is my scene. I have saved my emitter as a shape and have used it 12 times to make the snow come down like I want.

Here is a frame from a test animation. I am still working on the timming and speed of the animation but you get the idea with this frame. Tip: You won't see any snow being emitted in the first frame of the animation. You will need to move down the timeline to get a test render that will show the snow falling.

Enjoy!