I am rendering snowy backgrounds and will be putting in poser animals (layered in) ...and would be sooo much better if I could put realistic prints in the snow....any suggestions?

thanks

Erk - painting white is very difficult - nearly as bad as black.  It is possible, but will require a lot of patience in postwork.  Luckily, there is a cheat. ;)

First of all, you have to analyse how footprints look in the snow.  Google some scenes that contain the sort of animal that you'll be putting into your images and see how their footprints look.  Once you have an idea of that, draw the footprints onto a new layer.  Go to effects, bevel and emboss, and set them to

Inner bevel, and set the direction to down. Set the depth (this depends on your scene, as to how deep you want to make them look), apply an inner shadow (the exact settings depend on your lighting, play around until you find something you're happy with)

And there you should have a footprint.  Duplicate the layer and you can play around resizing and repositioning each footprint. 

This will depend on the angle of the background shot.

But I have to say, since it was brought up ... you don't have to worry about painting white. Shadows on white snow will have the same ambiant colors as the sky -- so the sides of the footprint impressions will be grayish blue most likely. Also, again, depending on the angle of the shot, the layer effects and styles may not work all that well. This is just something better done painted, one of the reasons being that displaced snow make little hills on the edges of footprints, another being that perspective (angle of shot) changes the shape of the actual footprints.

I wish I could give you more tips, but to tell you everything I want to tell you about how to do this would involve a full-blown tutorial that I just don't have the time to write right now.

Yeah, aprilgem does have a lot of good points there, and after scouting aroud, I've found this for you: http://www.andynicholas.com/thezone/index.php?area=showitem&fromarea=art&page=0&order=0&sort=date&article=3

It's not for photoshop, but like the author says, it can be adapted.  Hope it helps!

Woah, hold on...I've found an even better one.  OK, this one's for paint shop Pro, but again, it can be adapted.  If you scroll down to section 5 it shows you what to do.  (the rest of the tut's pretty interesting too!  Sorry- Star Wars fan.)

http://the-holocron.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=32&Itemid=48

Attached Link: My Panoramas

This is very crude, as a test...made some "snow"... did a select in a crude shape of bear paws...then started playing with Bevel Boss in Eye Candy 4000... never really used this filter ... and I like it! I might feather the selection for the edges... look into the color, etc... but that is the easy part!  You can see from the three sets I played with the lighting and how different the print can look.

I am working on creating a snow world backdrop for a huge QuickTime Panorama in which I will be putting all the cold climate animals I can, and just have to have prints to make it more realistic! :)

Thanks for the push in the direction of bevels...and hope that in turn my screen cap might provide some ideas!

Lyne

I use Bevel Boss for a LOT of things you would never expect it to be used for. it's an extremely useful filter when you adjust the options to get what you want.

For the color on your prints, since you have eye candy, you might want to look at the shadowlab filter, change the shadow color to blue and mess about with spacing and opacity and all till it looks right.

Uh. So I take it this means the angle is straight on from the top? In which case, yeah, bevel works. I was picturing a more conventionally angled shot.

Well Voyager tends to make a scene that is more viewed from the top...just a bit of angle.. kinda tricky... but pretty sure if I do selections that are more "narrow" for the perspective of it, it will work... and much better than NO prints at all... THANKS for the clue on the color! :)