Snow Blend Shaders – MaterialX
I made 4 new shaders breaking down a snow shader blend. These shaders were tested in Maya 2025 and Unreal 5.4 and can be used in either.
The basis for all of the blends, the dot product of the surface normal and the world up vector provides a 0-1 blend from the most upward facing surfaces to the most downward facing surfaces. Maya is 0,1,0 while Unreal is 0,0,1.
Adding basic controls to the blend for offsetting the blend to more or less parallel surfaces and sharpening/softening the blend.
Remapping the controls to accept values between 0-1 for the offset and blend. This allows it to behave more like a snow shader, with a 100% snow portion, a 100% base portion, and a controllable blend in between. At 0 offset the snow only appears at the most straight up angles, at 1 it appears at 90 degree angles, and pushed to 2 it covers the rest. The blend is also controllable between 0-1 although it can also be pushed beyond 1 for extra sharpness.
I added noise to the blend, to disrupt the gradient appearance. I did this by adding noise to the offset, which in turn added waves to the boundary between the overlay material and the base material. While i experimented with 3D noise in Maya i found it didnt work in Unreal so I made a tileable 2d noise texture instead, which i was able to use in the same way.
