Snowy Mountains
After finishing the sunset landscape over water, I wanted to try snowy mountains, as a throwback to my first ever landscape render 4 years ago. Instead of using a real world heightmap or the A.N.T Landscape addon, I created my own procedural heightmap with shader nodes. This method required less computing power because it worked with adaptive subdivision, creating a higher poly mesh only near the camera. I distorted a gradient with a zigzag pattern and high detail noise and distributed it across the plane with a Voronoi texture. The zigzag pattern makes it look like real world erosion with smaller sharp ridges coming from big peaks. Then I duplicated the entire setup 3 times with different placements and took the maximum of all 3. This eliminated the sharp valleys and made the shape more natural. I created a mask for the snow by using a threshold of the dot product of the normal and a direction facing almost straight up. I used a clear afternoon hdri for the lighting.Â
Nodetree