How to Create Interactive Footsteps on Snow in Blender

Step 1: Setting up the scene

We will use a plane as the ground, a sphere as the foot, a sun lamp, and a camera. We will scale, move, and rotate them to create a basic scene.

Step 2: Creating the snow material

We will use a noise texture to create the snow surface, and a displacement map to create the snow depth. We will connect them to the principled BSDF, the bump, and the displacement nodes. We will change the settings of the nodes and the material to make the snow look realistic and deformable.

Step 3: Creating the dynamic paint system

We will use dynamic paint to make the sphere interact with the plane and create the footsteps. We will make the plane a canvas and the sphere a brush. We will change the settings of the canvas and the brush to make them displace and paint based on their proximity. We will bake the image sequence for the canvas.

Step 4: Animating the sphere

We will use keyframes to animate the sphere’s location and rotation. We will make the sphere move and rotate along the X, Y, and Z axes to create different steps. We will change the shape of the sphere to a capsule to make it more like a foot.

Step 5: Rendering the scene

We will use Eevee as the render engine and set some render settings. We will enable ambient occlusion, bloom, and screen space reflections. We will change the resolution and the file format. We will render the scene as a video file.

Video Examples

Here are some video examples from YouTube that show how to create interactive footsteps on snow in Blender: