This tutorial will show you how to make a simple blizzard in Maya using the particle instancer.

Before starting this tutorial it would be a good idea to look at my previous tutorials about particle instancers.

Make simple ground using poly or nurbs geometry. Make particle emitter. Set type to volume box. Also set direction in which you want your particles to be “fired”. Also set directional speed.

I made the particles red, that doesn’t matter. If you want to change particle color go to the per particle (array) tab. In the bottom there’s a color button. In the dialog box choose per object attribute. The new attributes shall appear in rendering tab.

As you can see particles pass right through ground surface.

To make particles collide with surface go to particles/make collide option box. Set resilience to 0 (it defines bounciness), and friction to 1. Now particles will stick to the surface. Also here I animated the emitter’s position and rate. To animate just the emitter's position use shift+w

Then I modeled simple geometry for ice spikes.

Select geometry and then select particle. Go to particles/instancer option box. Remove particleShape from the list. If you want to use multiple spikes look at my tutorial for wall destruction. There I explained how to use multiple objects in instancer.

If object you selected was not in the origin you shall get something like this.

Undo few steps, and move spike to the origin and freeze transformation.

In instancer tab of particleShape change aimDirection to velocity.

If you try to rotate the object, the particles will not be affected. Instead select all vertices, and in rotate tool settings enable snap rotate. Then rotate all vertices.

Now it looks right.

Until it collides. When particle hits surface its velocity goes to 0,0,0. The point of this tutorial is to show you how to avoid that.