It's holiday time! I know that everyone likes to play in the snow every and now then, so I'm sure you will enjoy this tutorial on creating realistic snow. Afterwards, you can create snow anytime of year you want;)

1-
Create a composition with a background image and a new solid.
[Figure 1] For this tutorial, name the composition “Snowy Cabin”.

[Figure 1]

2-
You can create snow a couple different ways, but I'll show you two of my favorites here. The first is Foam. In your Effects & Presets palette, type in “Foam”. You should see a Foam animation preset. Drag & Drop this preset on your solid layer.

3-
You'll see a red circle. [Figure 2] This is going to be where the snow particles are emitted from. We don't want snow to begin in the middle of the composition, so let's drag it to right above the composition. This way it will look like it's falling like regular snow.

[Figure 2]

*Note: If you scrub your CTI through your timeline….you'll see bubbles! [Figure 3] Bubbles are the standard emitter for Foam, and we will change that in just a few steps. For right now, just leave it as is. To make the bubbles fall a little more like snow, though, twirl open the Physics parameter and adjust the Initial Direction of the snow to 180

[Figure 3]

4-
Create a new comp named “Snow flake.” Create a shape layer that you want to be used as the snowflake. I used the polygon tool and set the fill color to white.  You only need this one because this will be emitted as many others in a moment. [Figure 4]

[Figure 4]	[Figure 5]

5-
Drag the “Snow flake” composition into the “Snowy Cabin” composition. [Figures 5 & 6] Turn the Snow flake layer's visibility off. Select the solid layer that Foam was applied to in Step 2, and navigate to the Effects Palette.

[Figure 6]

6-
Twirl open the Rendering parameter. Change the Bubble Texture parameter to User Defined>Snow flake. Now, our crazy bubbles are gone and we have snowflakes! If you hit the Home key and preview your animation, you now have falling snow. There are a few problems though…[Figure 7]

[Figure 7]

7-
First, twirl open the Producer parameter. Change the Producer X Siace to something that covers the entire width of your composition. I would also lower the Producer Y Size to something rather small. Under the Bubbles parameter, I would also adjust the size of the snowflakes to something smaller. [Figure 8]

[Figure 8]

8-
Another thing to make the snow look even more realistic is to apply a fast blur to it. Type fast blur in the Effects & Presets Palette to get to it. I set my blur to 4. [Figures 9 & 10]

[Figure 9]	[Figure 10]

9-
Wala! Snow:)

10-
An even quicker way to create realistic snow is with the CC Snow preset. By typing CC Snow into the Effects & Presets Palette, you'll get to it. This gives you a pretty good snow effect from the start, but doesn't give you the overall control that using Foam does. For instance, if you needed the wind to be more prevalent in the scene, with CC Snow you don't have the controls for it.