After seeing my first snowflake in my life, I was inspired to create how I might visualize the fluttering of butterflies and snowflakes.
I have always learned and seen snowflakes, but after seeing the snowflakes in real life I wanted to simulate how I might visualized my imagined augment to encorporate my imagination.
I started doing preliminary research on what snowflakes look like and found high quality images of different types of snowflakes. I observed that snowflakes form when water droplets touch with dust particles and crystalize they for snowflakes. The crystal structures form hexagonial forms that look symmetrical. From this information, I used my observations to model one branch of the snowflake and duplicated it 6 times sewing the pieces together.
Initially, I placed an aiStandardSurface on the form with a deep water and frosted glass mix on it but it did not give the effect that I was looking for. It looked like a frosted glass, referring back to the images I took from real life and online this did not look correct. I wanted to create a more crystalized pattern and looked into adding a bumpmap to create the crystal like forms.
After, I created this the forms still looked a bit flat. I then extruded out the surfaces of the snowflake to create extra dimension similar to how gemstone are cut.
I had to play around with the UVs and experiment with what size I wanted to make the UV in relation to the bump map details.
From this I then played with camera angles to see what angle would not only show the snowflakes off best but to also have them seen. I angled the camera so that the snowflakes would be infront of some trees. I reality, I saw the snowflakes best against my black jacket and darker brown hair.