 It's been a while since I've done a blender tutorial, but I am working in Blender 2.67 today and what we're going to do is we're going to do a snowflake effect in front of an image or video. We'll make it so that you can render this out as a video that you can later on superimpose on top of images or videos and then I'll also show you how you can do it right here in blender there's multiple ways to do it and we aren't going to go for real realistic snowflakes although you could we're going to go for ones you know that look like drawings of snowflakes so what I did first was I did a Google search for snowflake found an image that I liked of course you really should make sure you have the rights to use the image and I made sure that it had a transparent background and it was just the white so here's an example this is blenders in full screen mode here this is the original image I found it's a JPEG and it has a black border and white background neither of which I want so I brought it into GIMP added an alpha channel and cut away the black I can go into that because pretty simple and not really part of the tutorial which is on Blender you can also find snowflakes that are already have a transparent background so that would be an option as well so here we are in our default scene I am going to hide those two tabs there hitting T for that one and then for this one bring them in and out also notice that I did turn on screen cat is casting this time so you can see what keys and mouse buttons I'm pressing down at the bottom here I'm gonna delete the default cube and the default light because I don't need a light source for this gonna hit zero on my or one on my number pad and then control alt zero it's bringing the camera into the front view so I'm looking straight on so next thing I need to do is open up my user preferences user preferences and under add-ons you're gonna want to and I always have this enabled by default but if you just type in plain you'll find what says import images as plain it makes it very easy to import images as plain as a plane so once you have that enabled I'm gonna hit spacebar and if you just type in plain you'll see you can add a plain or import images as plain gonna do choose that I'm gonna go to the folder where I have the image saved it's a PNG it's right here I'm gonna set the shadeless use alpha Z transparent and I'm gonna say import images plain so there it is it's laying flat we can't see it right now because it's laying flat so I'm gonna hit R X and 90 hit enter to rotate it 90 degrees I'll hit F 12 you can see we have a big old snowflake there great what I'm gonna do is I'm going to with that selected object apply rotation just good and have a doing that in this we're gonna have randoms falling snowflakes I don't think it really matters but we're gonna move that off to the side so it's out of our view for now now I'm gonna hit spacebar and type in plain again and just add a regular plane which is laying flat in front of us I'm gonna scale it up so it's a little bit wider than our camera view grab it on the z-axis and move it up so it's just add the camera view okay and in fact I'm going to scale it up a little bit bigger and move it up a little bit because I do I want to get some of the flakes pretty close to the camera so if I go into my side view here you can see it's pretty close to the camera now again be artistic whatever you think looks better with that plane selected though I am going to go over to our particles tab add particles and if we hit alt a over 3d view here alt a we'll start playing an animation so we already have kind of a snowflakey typefall thing we got a lot of them outside the camera view doesn't really matter but I'm gonna do now is I'm going to escape to stop that I'm gonna hit shift and up arrow a few times so we get to a frame with a bunch I'm gonna show you right now I have 12 we got these nasty little orb things which might be good if that's the effect you're going for but it's not we're going for and this reason because our particles is set to halos we want to do is set it to match this object over here which is our plane with our images snowflakes on it so with the emitter plane our big plane up here selected I'm going to scroll down under its particles tab and change where it says halo to object and inside the object I'm going to click here should rename it but it was the first plane I imported so it's called plane I'm very bad about naming things but I know the order I imported them this is plain this is plain and this is plain dot zero zero one you can see them up in the little tree up here in case you get confused again with the big plane zero zero one chosen so we've set it to match this object here so if I hit f12 now you can see little dots and they you don't really see the snowflake thing because they're all pointing in we're gonna set to some random settings here to adjust that a little bit so again with that plane select I'm going to scroll up turn up the randomness here turn this random on and under I'm gonna just check rotation which will give us somewhat of a randomness of the rotation so we got the snowflakes falling again you can tweak those numbers to fit what you like let's get to a frame in here and hit f12 they're all pretty small so you you have two options inside the particle tab we can adjust the the size here which is one option which is a good option or if you want you can always just resize the original and it's proportionate to that you can see they're all still pointing down so with this plane selected let's go back up to our rotation here and turn the randomness up about halfway and now they should start rotating in somewhat of a random pattern it does not look like they are let's turn this random basically I'm just turning up everything it says random to get there we go that's a little bit better so now we're getting more of a random snowflake fall now it takes a little while for them to come in and then they fade away at the end and that's do with the number that we set when it starts the lifespan of them and when they end but I'm pretty happy with what we've got what I'm just gonna do is I'm going to again I could set the start to be before the first frame but I come in here we're about where they are fully covering the screen which is around frame around 40 to 50 so I'm just gonna set the first keyframe or the first frame of our scene to 50 and the last one I think will be about 200 yeah it's a little higher than 200 but I'm gonna set 200 like nice round numbers 200 so come in here in the middle somewhere we'll hit f12 we got these snowflakes falling let's make it a black background we're gonna choose our worldview here horizon whoops and set it down to black f12 so now we have our snowflakes falling with a black background again you can tweak those numbers more and maybe get you can get you know some wind going if you want put in a force all depending on how you want to look I'm happy with this right here so as we fall I want to see if we have any close-up flakes so there there's a pretty decent size one will hit f12 so you'll get those big flakes every once in a while now you could render this out as a video and use it as an overlay on pictures and videos in the future either importing it back into blender in its video editor or its compositor or you can bring it into a video editor like Kaden live or really pretty much any editor will give you the ability to do an addition blend kind of like if you're in Gimp or Photoshop and you have your different modes for layers and you set to addition if you watch the tutorial on adding snowflakes to a still image we use the addition option you can do the same thing pretty much any video editor so you could render that out and avoid having to go through this whole process again later or you can save this blend file what I'm going to do now is I'm going to take the image that I want to use import it as a plane and just put it behind all the snowflakes and render it out as is that's another way of doing it so again I'm going to hit spacebar and I type in plane import images as plane I'm gonna use shadeless alpha doesn't matter there is no alpha in this image but I'm just gonna leave it checked because that's I guess it's check now and I'm gonna choose the image that I want you can also you know do a thumbnail view here to find the image you want so I'm gonna import that it's lying flat there I'm gonna hit Rx I almost sneezed okay Rx type 90 on your number pad hit enter it's rotated now we want to make sure that it's back behind all our snowflakes I'm gonna hit three then grab three on the number pad to turn to the side view G to grab Y and then pull it back just to make sure it's behind our snowflakes zero on the nerve pad to go back to our front our camera view which is our front view in this case and we're gonna hit S and scale that up so that it's just outside the image that our camera border so here's our camera here's the image you'll notice that still images and videos are of different ratios that's why we're gonna be cropping it videos tend to be a little bit wider than what still cameras take same goes when you go to get photos printed for some reason cameras take a more it's not a rectangle or not square but it's more of a square shape then they actually print so if you ever had to go print photos sometimes you might notice that things get cropped on the top and bottom same thing here but the way we have it set up that plane back behind all our snowflakes this snowflake out of the way this plane up here I did I mention we made it so it's emitted objects it's out of the camera view but we can also click uncheck the emitters so in case for some reason this ended up in the camera view by accident it won't render so we'll uncheck that but at this point I can hit f12 and there's the picture with the snowflakes and now we can go to our render tab here and I can choose that I want to save it under snowfall.avi in fact we got to change it I'm gonna use Xvid that's why I like to use a lot of people like the H264 it's up to you I'm going with Xvid here but you also have to choose the encoding here it has it seems to there was a previous version of blender where it did not put the preset properly so you would have to come in here and choose Xvid again which is what I'm doing now so I would do that just to be sure and you can adjust the you know the bit rate if you wanted here I'm just gonna leave it 600 or 6000 is kind of low but for this project doesn't matter in fact at this point the by default I have it set to be 1080p you can choose presets from the drop down here but also notice by default blender does a half resolution so if you want to render the full 1080p you're gonna want to turn that up at this point we have I'm saving it I'm saving it to my temp folder obviously you don't want to do that you want to save actually save the video long term but I click animate and it will start to rendering out the images and at least on my computer it's taken about two seconds of frame and we're doing 150 frames so you do the math it's gonna take a couple of minutes but we'll see the end results here in a moment anyway I thank you for watching and please visit my website filmsbychrist.com that's Chris the K link in the description normally I have videos on Mondays Wednesdays and Fridays this was a bonus Christmas video for you so I hope that you have a Merry Christmas if you don't celebrate Christmas you should it's lots of fun and please visit my website again links in the description and I hope that you have a great day