Author Date

2025-11-28

Degree Name

BFA

Department

Visual Arts

College

Fine Arts and Communications

Defense Date

2025-12-05

Publication Date

2025-12-16

First Faculty Advisor

Seth Holladay

First Faculty Reader

Craig Van Dyke

Honors Coordinator

Sam Nielson

Keywords

animation, pipeline, tools, shader

Abstract

Love and Gold is the BYU Center for Animation’s 2025 senior capstone short film. This ambitious film is the longest produced in the history of the animation program. It’s a love story that takes place in at least five different large environment sets. Two of these sets contain snow. This creative thesis tackles the problem of surfacing the snow within that context.

Surfacing snow required research and development of a snow generator for adding new geometry on top of objects in a scene and a snow shader to make that geometry appear like snow in the final render. Packaging the generator and shader into a layout tool in the pipeline was critical when creating the exterior environment under tight production deadlines. The snow tools effectively created snow that suited both dangerous night scenes and romantic sunset scenes.