Once I had the flag set up and in place, I added a wind node and decided on which direction I wanted the wind to go in. This doesn’t sound super crucial but part of making a believable scene is adhering to real-life rules, and if I’m going to do that I need to understand that whatever direction the wind is going in, I need to ensure that all particle effects follow that same direction.

As a final touch to the flag I added the light on top, I thought this would have two desired effects. From a narrative standpoint, it’s used to create a beacon of light for people who are looking for the arctic base. From an artistic standpoint, I thought having a light-up there helped make the wind ripples stand out and added some nice shadows to the flag

Next up was snow particles. I’ve made dust in the past so I figured this would be a similar setup, apart from instead of having them float around the room, I would make them have some gravity and directionality from the wind.

After playing around with the particle effects editor I found that the key components to making believable snow were the ‘initial velocity’ and the ‘spawn location’. The velocity controls how fast the snow will be moving when it spawns and so because snow is very thick and fluffy I wanted to make sure that when the particles were falling, they were moving slower than something like rain. As mentioned before I also added wind and so to match this I added a higher value bias in the velocity to the X coordinate so that this would be my wind direction control. When I place the snow particle in the scene I just need to make sure that X faces the direction of my wind.

‘Initial Location’ and ‘spawn’ kind of work together. If you have too much snow spawn in a small area then it will look like a blizzard, but if you have too little in a large space then you will not see the snow. I found the best result was to set up the ‘Initial Location’ to be just slightly larger than the ‘play area’ and then control the amount that spawns to fit the desired look.