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in the next 20 minutes you will learn how to create a winter landscape. For this excersize you do need to have only a basic experience in Lightwave, so lets just start with it.

First of all you need a Model. There are some ways to create a landscape and I used Terragen ([You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]

Mow on to the Surface. Open the "Surface Editor" and set the parameters like I did:

First go to "color" and click "T" then add these 5 layers:

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Next click on Automatic size only on the crust layer and use a position of x/y/z 0/0/0

Now, lets do the bump, go to "Bump" and click on "T"; I guess 2 layers are enough here:

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...and finally under "shaders" add "Fast Frensel" and set the Reflectivity down to 95%.

The light is very important in this scene so you have to play a bit with it before it looks like you want it.

I used 3 Distant Lights, the first coming from the left with 23.5% Light Intensity and RGB value of 249/254/255. The secound light comes with 30% Light Intensity and RGB of 0/30/98, from behind the camera and a white light from the top.

Now on to the sky go to "Scene" and click on "Generatics" under "Utilities" and choose "SkyGen".

We`ll use 3 layers for the sky:

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Use a position of x/y/z -85mm/360mm/0mm

Finally, we`ll use a Particle system, Hyper Voxels and a wind effector for the snow. I did these Scene as an animation, so I will show how to set up the snow for a 3300 frame animation.

Lets start with the Particle system got to Items->Add->PFX->Add Particle Emitter and click OK.

Now some settings

Generator:

Birth rate: 100000.0
Particle limit: 100000
Start frame -40

and set the Generator size so that it fit with your landscape.

Particles:
Particle weight: 1
Life time(frame): 3340
Now go to Scene->Effects->Volumetrics and add hyperVoxels. Double click on it and double click again on your emitter.

Under Geometry set the Particle size to 18mm and the size variation to 0%. Under Shading use the color RGB 255/255/255, set the Luminosity up to 100%.

At last we need wind. Go to Item->Add->PFX->Add Wind effector and click on OK.

Use Wind mode: random

Blend mode: max
Radius: the same size your Particle System and the Landscape have
Power: 5000%

Now just add some blur, I used a normal motion blur with 150% while the camera was moving fast so it looked very blurry...

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Here is another rendering with less blur...

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At the end I want to say that some of the settings like Wind power could be too high for your scene because your Landscape size might not be as big or bigger than mine, so play with the settings to get a good result and don't forget to use "WaveFilter Image" to add some sharpnes or blur more or what ever you like.]