A festive particle treat…….

For a bit of fun and to learn an extra technique I wanted to play with particles.  The first idea I had was to play with some smoke but in the end I found myself making a snow scene which the final video of is at the end of this blog post.

The first step is to add a particle system, for the purpose of this experiment I chose Super Spray.

Most of the following operations take place in the modifier panel. The first of these was to load the hose preset for the particle stream.

The next step was to choose dots for the viewport display and I also left the particles percentage at 100%
  

I also slightly adjusted the spread of the particle formulation 

Because I wanted to create snow which floats down to the ground fairly slowly I reduced the particle motion down to 2 but then gave it a variation of 15% so that the flakes wouldn't  look too uniform as they came down the screen.

For the partials size after some experimentation I went for 15 this seemed to create the right size flake in proportion to the scene. I also added a bit of variation just to clear any uniformity. 
  

Below is a shot of the materials panel with the materials for the scene. The black and 2 whites are for the snowman and falling snow and the orange is for the snowman's nose and the image is for the background.
Once again I used the architectural materials for the snow man because I feel these give a much better finish. 

Below is the wireframe for the positioning of the snowman. In the screenshot you can see the the position of the camera and the particle jets located above the snowman.

After rendering a couple of times I thought that the black background that you get when your mesh is the only thing in shot didn't look very good.
To correct this I added a plane and rotated it to act as a wall and then added a nice festive snowy forest texture to it.
I also added some animation to the snowman where he looks to the left then right and then up at the snow coming down. 

The Finished Article