Merry Christmas!
It may be a bit early but I decided to make this render to have something for christmas. I'm very pleased with how this turned out and was honestly about to give up halfway through when one of the geometry nodes didn't work.
For this render my main focus was to get some really realistic closeup snow and a christmas ball as the subject. Originally i tried to just make a plane and apply a snow texture to it which I quickly realized wasn't gonna look good at all when close up. This is because of the fact that snow has this "fuzzy" texture to it on the top which you can see in the render, and this is what really sells it as real snow.
I'm not skilled enough to use geometry nodes for this effect though, so I ended up following a really good tutorial on how to make this fuzzy snow texture, which I have linked below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXgTIgn8mNo
Very simply explained, how this geometry nodes setup works is that it scatters about a million tiny, detailed, snow crystals around on a small plane which gives it this realistic effect. So basically there is no way of cheating this effect (that I know of) and the only way to do it is to brute force your way through 1 million tiny crystals with ice shaders on them. And as you can imagine this took ages to render.
The christmas ball is a very simple model, mostly consisting of a UV-Sphere. The texture for it was made by me using nodes in the shader editor, and I am pretty satisfied with what I managed to make. Here is the setup:
The lighting setup consists of one warm point light that illuminates the scene and a small chain of christmas lights for some extra effect.
When rendering this I decides to turn off the denoiser and instead turn up the samples to 2048 to get a natural film grain effect that really sells the realism. In the compositor I added a simple vignette effect and I also set the color management setting to Khronos PBR Neutral because I think it makes the colors pop.
And that is pretty much everything for this render.
Merry christmas!
