Animating Falling Snow in Our 3D Animated Christmas Card
In this quick tutorial I show how to animate falling snow by creating a seamless loop of falling snowflakes using the built-in particle systems in Blender 5. I created the above 4K 3D animated Christmas card with falling snow as a test project while learning the open-source Blender 3D animation software. I figured it would be a good opportunity to pass on some of what I learned during the project. The same technique can be used for any repeating cycle of particles in Blender, like falling rain, falling leaves, running water, floating particles, etc.
At DreamLight, we’ve used many different 3D software systems over more than three decades, from Swivel 3D and MacRenderMan through Strata 3D to LightWave 3D and Modo. We’ve recently switched to the open-source Blender software for DreamLight’s 3D modeling, animation and rendering. I had periodically tried Blender a few times over the years. It used to have a rather clunky GUI (graphical user interface) that never really clicked for me. The more recent versions of the Blender 4 & 5 series however, sport a fully customizable, modern GUI that really leverages the underlying power of the Blender software. So, I finally decided to make the switch to Blender.
We were honored to have this project featured on BlenderNation's Best of Blender Artists: 2026-40, October 2, 2026.
Let’s dive right in!
In order to animate falling snow, we’ll first need some snowflakes to animate. These flakes will mostly be in motion, motion and DOF blurred, and rather small, so they don’t need to be very accurate or detailed. A simple fluffy looking web like object will do. I started by creating a simple default Icosphere with Add -> Mesh -> Ico Sphere. I then scaled the sphere down to about 3.5 cm (particles will be scaled down further than that when actually used).
You could then push and pull points manually to make the sphere look more irregular. I knew I wanted to create a few different versions of the snowflake, so instead, I added a Displacement Modifier with Object -> Modifiers -> Add Modifier -> Deform -> Displace.
I then clicked the + New button to create a new texture to displace the icosphere’s points. You can experiment with any texture and settings that result in a good random irregular shape.
Texturing the Snowflakes
I then set the Icosphere to smooth shade with Object -> Shade Smooth. I added a new material to the icosphere and set up a few material nodes to create a wispy web like snowflake in the Shading Workspace.
Once I had one snowflake, I then used Shift-D to duplicate the snowflake twice. I duplicated the Displacement Texture in each Displace Modifier on each of the two new snowflakes. I also tweaked their settings to create different shaped snowflakes. Here is a closeup of the three snowflakes as rendered using the scene’s lighting.
I moved these three snowflakes into a new group named Snowflakes. Once happy with the flakes, you could apply the modifiers to the objects converting the displace modified objects into plain meshes for faster rendering if you wish. When the snowflakes objects are finished you may turn the Snowflakes Collection off to exclude them from the view layer so these original flakes don’t show in the view or render. These snowflake objects will be used in the particle systems and those particle instances’ snowflakes will be rendered instead to animate falling snow.
Let it Snow! Animate Falling Snow in Blender’s Particle System
Now that we have a collection of snowflakes, it’s time to let them fall from the sky to animate falling snow. I created a large plane placed just above the camera view from which to generate the snowflakes. To this sky plane I attached a Particle System Modifier with Object -> Modifiers -> Add Modifier -> Physics -> Particle System and set it to be an Emitter. I used the following settings for this initial snowfall particle system.
Particle System Emission
Number: 20,000
Frame Start: 151
Frame End: 300
Particle Lifetime: 150
This will create 20,000 snowflake particles, some of which will begin generating and falling at frame 151. New flakes will continue to be generated every frame until frame 300. Each of these flakes will last for 150 frames, so the last flakes generated on frame 300 will continue falling up to frame 451 (300 frames past 151).
I’m starting at frame 151 because I used other particle systems on the frames before 150 to pre-dump a heap of snowflakes onto the objects and the ground plane prior to the falling flakes of this particle system. That way the ground and objects will already be coated with snowflakes before our snowfall loop begins on camera for rendering the 150 frames from frame 301 to 450.
Animate Falling Snow Strategy
I’ll be using two overlapping copies of the same falling snow particle system, offsetting the second by 150 frames so that the positions of the flakes on the first and last frame match. Because both particle systems will be falling through the exact same turbulence field, with the same settings, their particle motions will match as well.
One note about configuring this particle system to be able to loop properly. It’s important to set the speed and timing settings to make sure that all the flakes generated by the first particle system have fallen out of view by frame 450. This is important because any flakes remaining in view on frame 450 from the first particle system will disappear when the the animation loops back to the beginning of frame 301. Tthat would create a slight visual glitch. If all the flakes from the first particle system are gone from view when it loops then the second particle system will begin exactly where the first did. That way the flakes will fall with the exact same motions and the loop will be perfectly seamless.
Particle Velocity & Rotation
There are different ways to make particles move. When the particles are initially generated they can have an initial velocity to move in various directions. I set the initial velocity to -0.5 m/s along the Normal. This makes the flakes start falling downward because the normal in the particle generator plane faces upward. I also set some random rotations on the particles so that the flakes would spin in random directions as they fell. I tweaked the settings until I achieved a gentle random rotation of the falling flakes to make them move naturally.
Particle Rendering
In order to attach the snowflake objects to the particles I set the Render settings to Render As a Collection. Then set the Instance Collection to the Snowflakes collection which contains the three snowflake objects that we had created previously. I used the Scale settings to scale the snowflakes down further. I also set Scale Randomness to provide some randomness to their size. That way they are more natural looking and not all an artificially uniform size. The flakes will also appear different sizes based on their distance to the camera as well.
Particle Field Weights
Various Force Fields move Particles in Blender, the primary one is Gravity. Snow typically falls slower than solid objects due to the light snowflakes floating on the air currents. In Blender you could apply additional force fields to slow the particles such as Drag or Wind. The easiest way to simply slow them down however is to just lower the weight of Gravity on the particles, so I set the Gravity weight to 0.050 which sufficiently slows the particles to look like snowflakes.
If you use these settings and run the particle system as-is the snowflakes will fall slow enough, but they will just fall straight down. Real snowflakes tend to drift around while they fall as the flakes ride the many tiny air currents like tiny little sails. So we are not quite done yet... We’ll add a Turbulence Force Field.
Adding a Turbulence Force Field
In order to deflect the falling snowflakes in various directions we’ll use a Turbulence Force Field with Add -> Force Field -> Turbulence. It doesn’t really matter where it’s placed in the scene because we won’t be using any falloff so it will affect everywhere the same.
You can tweak the settings to your liking using the strength and size to control how much the turbulence will affect the snowflakes and how tight the turbulence pattern is. I used a Strength of 3.000 and left the Size at 0.000. That gave the snowflakes a pretty realistic looking turbulence as they gently fell through the force field.
Note: I avoided using any Noise Amount in case that added randomness that might not be the same on multiple different particle systems because we’ll be using two identical particle systems to get the first and last frame to match for a seamless loop. I didn’t test the noise, but because the noise is random it probably calculates differently between different particle systems that span different frames. That would cause the falling snowflakes to move differently and they wouldn’t properly match up for a seamless loop. We need both sets of falling snowflakes to move identically, so there was no need to play around introducing any random noise that could prevent a seamless loop.
Duplicating the Particle System to Animate Falling Snow in a Seamless Repeating Loop
Once you animate falling snow with a particle system falling through the turbulence force field with satisfactory results it’s time to create a seamless loop. We have a particle system that begins generating particles at frame 151 that fall through a static turbulence force field. These particles continue being generated and falling through the force field to frame 300, and some continue falling beyond that.
The first particle system generates particles at certain places on frames 151 through 300, for 149 frames. We can duplicate that particle system and adjust the start and end frames of the duplicate to 301 and 450, for a second 149 frames. This way we’ll have two sets of snowflakes falling through 149 frames. Some of the snowflakes that are generated near the end of the first 149 frames continue to fall beyond that into the second set of 149 frames. This produces a repeating loop from frame 301 through 450 which we can use as a seamless repeating loop. So I duplicated the sky plane named Snow Particle Plane Fall 1 with the first particle system using Command-D. I named the duplicate Snow Particle Plane Fall 2. Then duplicated the ParticleSettings that the duplicate uses. Left all settings the same, except changing the start and end frames from 151 and 300 to 301 and 450.
NOTE: You may be able to use the same plane with multiple particle systems applied to it, but when I tried that I was getting erratic results. It appeared the multiple particle systems on the same plane were interfering with each other, so I just duplicated the plane to keep all the particle systems completely separated which worked fine. This could have been an issue with Blender 5.0.0, and may be worth investigating further in future updates.
Pre-dumping Snow on Objects and the Ground
Dumping Snow on the Objects
We now have a seamless loop of falling snow from frame 301 to 450 which we can loop for continued snowfall. During a real snowfall snow would obviously accumulate on surfaces and the ground. But if we used our loop to have snow collect on the surfaces during our 149 frames of snowfall it would give away the loop because some of that collected snow would keep disappearing when it looped.
The way I solved that was to pre-dump snow on the surfaces of the objects and the ground before we reach frame 301. That way there is already a coating of snowflakes on the surfaces and ground so our snow loop can pass right through without giving away the loop. To achieve this I set up two additional particle systems by duplicating the sky plane two more times, and duplicating their ParticleSettings. One will be used to dump snow just on the ground plane for an even distribution over the whole ground. The other will be to dump a more concentrated heap of snowflakes just on the objects in the scene.
I added Collision Modifiers on the ground plane and all the objects I wished to collect snow including the snowman, lettering and some of the pine boughs. I then put the ground plane in one Ground Collection and I put all the other objects in a second Object Collection in the Outliner. This way I could have the Ground Dump particle system only collide/collect particles on the Ground Collection and I could have the Object Dump particle system only collide/collect particles on the Objects Collection. I also created an Empty Collection that I could use to make the original two particle systems ignore all collisions by limiting their Collisions to the Empty Collection.
Dumping Snow on the Ground
For the Ground Dump particle system I set the Number to 50,000, Frame Start to -100, Frame End to 50 and Lifetime to 150. I set Physics -> Deflection -> Die on Hit ON and set the Collision Collection to Ground. By turning the Deflection -> Die on Hit ON it will make the particles stop once they make contact with the collision object. If you don’t do that the particles will continue moving after contact and slide/jitter around on the surface. When having the particles die it’s important to keep the particle’s attached object, the snowflake, still rendering even after the particle dies. So I also set the Render -> Extra’s Dead ON. That way the snowflakes won’t disappear when their particles die.
For the Object Dump particle system I scaled its plane down to just encompass the objects from above to concentrate the particles on the objects. I set the Number to 20,000, Frame Start to -10, Frame End to 30 and Lifetime to 50. To make the particles stop and stick to the objects I set the particles’ Deflection to Die on Hit. To continue to render when the particles were dead I set Extra -> Dead ON. I also set the Deflection -> Collision Collection to the Objects Collection.
When done, I then baked all particle systems and rendered the frames 301 to 450. I brought those frames into Apple Motion, looped them multiple times and added color adjustments, titles and music to finish the project in time for Christmas!
Blender Tutorial Source References
Blender Tutorials Used for Initial Portions of this Project
As I mentioned at the beginning of this tutorial, I have over three decades of experience with various 3D modeling, rendering and animation systems but have recently switched to Blender. So to get a quick start acclimating to Blender, I started going through a few tutorials to get the Blender conventions. Then I explored other areas of Blender to go beyond the basics in the tutorials relying on my existing 3D experience. The following are the initial beginner tutorials I followed, and the ‘beyond the basics’ versions I rendered leading up to this 3D animated Christmas card project which was my first 3D animation in Blender.
The Famous Beginner Blender Donut Tutorial
I began where many do when learning Blender, with Blender Guru's Blender 5.0 Beginner Donut Tutorial
Here’s the result of my version where I pushed the realism up a notch and created a slightly more complicated still life scene to explore a bit further than the tutorial went.
Blender for Complete Beginners Tutorial Series
After completing the donut tutorial, I then went on to Ryan King Art’s Blender for Complete Beginners Tutorial Series, where I built the initial snowman that I used as the basis for my 3D animated Christmas card.
Here’s the result of my version where I again pushed the realism up a notch and created a slightly more complex scene compositing it over a background photo.
Animating Snowfall in Blender with Seamless Looping Particle Systems
From there I moved on to animate falling snow in the scene. I explored the basics of creating a seamless loop of falling snow with Blender’s particle systems using Aaron Van de Weijenberg’s Animating snowfall in Blender with seamless looping particle systems tutorial. I made a few adjustments to the setup for my purposes in the 3D animated Christmas card.
I hope you enjoyed this simple tutorial showing how to animate falling snow!
In my next post, I may outline how I created the blinking Christmas lights for this project.
Stay tuned!
-MikeS
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