Info & Tips:
Iray HQ vs. Iray LQ Preloads:
The only difference between the Iray High-Quality and Low-Quality preloads are the Trees fully covered in Snow (Tree01).
On the HQ version they use Displacement Mapping, giving them a more natural look.
While the Rendering times barely differ, Iray calculates Subdivisions for it, which takes about 30 seconds.
Unfortunately it also does that when you use Iray in your Viewport/workspace.
Cut short, if you work in Texture shaded view it doesn`t affect you, go straight for the HQ version.
If you work in Iray shaded view, consider starting with the LQ version or hiding the trees while you set up your scene.
If you start with the LQ version, selecting the Tree01s, WII_Tree01Branches, Surface: W2SnowFull01, changing “Displacement Strength” from 0 to 1 gives you the exact same result like the HQ version.
Snow Props:
The two Snow props, W2_SnowDrifting and W2_SnowFalling, load with the scene, but are hidden by default.
Just unhide them to use them.
You can tweak the intensity through the surface settings for Transparency, Ambience, Emissive.
Poser, Performance:
The Snow Plane uses Preview Subdivisions 1. This slows my system (Poser10) down quite a bit, I am not sure if that`s an issue on my end or for everyone. If you feel your workspace/preview is slow, select W2_SnowPlane, go to your Properties window and turn Preview Subdivisions down to 0. It`s only really useful for the morphs. Keep the Render Subdivions as they are (2) though!
Winter II: Night & Dawn (SkySphere/HDRI)
In general this is a straight forward Skysphere/HDRI set. But the “scene” preloads are worth mentioning.
Daz Studio/Iray: What are those “Scene” preloads?
Daz Studio users will see four “Scene” preloads, saying “Requires Winter II Main”.
Those are for owners of “Easy Environments: Winter II”, anyone else can ignore them.
All they do is loading the geometry (scene) of the main set, but with materials adjusted for the night and dawn HDRIs.
The original scene just didn`t look right with the new skies, so I felt I had to add those new preloads for Iray users.
With 3Delight and Poser the original materials look fine, so they didn`t need that special treatment.