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Comment by Dirlewanger | Hacker News Reader

We're getting there. Looks more like wet sand though.

You must have grown up with snow. My thoughts exactly. It fell into the uncanny valley for me... Sort of close, but then off in unnerving ways.

Great work for where they got to, but it's not quite right yet.

As someone that grew up with snow and been to a beach more than I'd care to admit, I can't help but agree that it's quite the uncanny valley.

I'm sure Disney et al will find ways to distract you enough not to notice.

I'm far more interested in seeing snow falling, especially with (for example) a street-lamp contrasting it. That would be something to marvel at.

It looks mostly right for wet snow. Powdery snow wouldn't work like this though. Maybe they just didn't think that example was very interesting?

Yeah, the paper talks about how to vary the parameters to simulate powder, wet snow, slush, etc. These techniques were developed for the movie Frozen, and to my eye (I grew up with snow too) they did a great job of simulating all manner of snow and ice.

Yea, powdery snow isn't all that hard to simulate (relatively) I believe. The snowflakes are just particles that are acted upon by an outside force( wind usually). I live and grew up in New England, and the snow in Frozen looks completely realistic.

It's amazing the amount of work put into these movies. Most moviegoers won't realize what it took to simulate snow realistically, but the would have noticed if it was wrong.

I'd like to see some simulations of slab avalanches...The stuff with wet sticky snow looked okay but I think they missed the ability of even low density snow to act cohesively as slabs [1] (which leads to some of the most deadly avalanches). Need to review their math but maybe they only account for particle adhesion and not more crystalline structure (which would obviously make the simulation more expensive).

The woman walking (post holing is the technical term) looked off for the same reason...the snow didn't look slaby/crusty enough to act like it was.

[1]http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-4pGis30qlj0/TwcAGuSz8fI/AAAAAAAAAW...

...have you seen Frozen? Go see Frozen.

In the video, the clumpier it is, the better. I would say the more powdery snow looked like wet oatmeal when it hit the floor.

Yes, wet, too sticky. Still pretty good, but you can clearly tell that it doesn't behave like real snow just yet.

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