Dynamic Snow Footprints

Walking through deep snow in Red Dead Redemption 2 feels heavy because the ground keeps every step. I wanted that in Unreal Engine 4: trails that form wherever a character or an animal walks, stay there, and blend into the snow around them.

• Anything that moves should leave a trail: the player, other characters, a horse.
• Steps have to accumulate, not vanish when the character moves on.
• The ground deforms without tessellation in the first version.
• One setup for snow, sand, mud and wheel tracks.

A scene capture looks straight down at the ground: orthographic, 256 units wide, writing scene depth into a render target. Anything that should leave a trail renders into Custom Depth, and a depth-test material keeps only what is close to the ground. I tried two capture methods and kept the one that tracked moving objects most accurately and cheaply.

The capture overwrites itself every frame, so it feeds a second render target, a buffer, that keeps every step. The capture follows the player in discrete steps, and the buffer shifts by the same distance, so old prints stay where they were made.

The landscape material projects the buffer from world position, and the world displacement pushes the ground down. A snow-stack shader blurs the trail in eight directions and blends it with the untouched snow. Niagara adds falling snow and a burst of powder at every footstep.

I tested it with Unreal's mannequin, then with a Paragon character and a horse, in a scene built from Quixel Megascans.

The same setup covers snow, sand, mud and wheel tracks. It is still my most-liked post on ArtStation: 138 likes on 2 October 2026.