The basic layout (The Begining/ Setting the scene.)
The Landscapes.
I wanted to get the plain of the whole animation out of the way, so I sprung up a couple of "Landscapes", which you can select from the Object Selector, and picked seed 3 for the Landscapes at the front and the one at the back is seed 10, the one on the far end is seed 8. However, I wanted a flat surface from where the Landscapes ended, so I fixed up a Cube and flattened it, giving the plain a nice straight surface I can work on.
The Grass.
The grass you can see poking through the snow is actually a fur texture you can select from the Material tool (Materials > File > Hair Material > Fur). and can be placed on top of the landscape its self. What I did was copy the already existing landscapes and renamed them "Grass", making them much smaller and a little more underneath the landscape its self so it's not too little or too much "Grass", it's just enough.
The Sky.
The sky is a simple thing; A sphere with a picture taken of the clouds and sky. I placed the image into a sphere because I believed that it would look more realistic. We do live on a round planet after all! Also, it won't have the nasty edges a cube has, making the scene more beliveable.
Adding Texture, Lighting and the Snow Balls
The Texture.
Getting a snowy texture to pull off is quite hard, specially with limited lighting. I created a texture, selected White for the base colour and then in the bar on the side of the Materials window, I clicked bump and gave the snow a "Rusty" texture, so it had bumps and lumps, like snow has.
The Lighting.
The lighting was very hard to come up with, but I decided on a pastely yellow colour mixed with a normal pure white light. It gives it all a real life feel, as light isn't pure white or pure yellow, but a mixture of the two on a clear blue day. Snow also isn't purely white, but if I was to pick another colour but white to make it look realistic, it would look fake.
The Snow Balls.
Snow balls always have that unevenness to them, so I made a sphere and played around with the shape with the Magnet tool. To use the magnet tool and make multiple parts of the snow ball to disfigure, I used the live selection tool to pick out the places I wanted the magnet tool to focus on and then I pulled the sphere apart into rough lumps.
The Rock, Snowman Base and the Scarf
The Rock.
I will make the rock the same way I made the landscapes; Select the Landscape Object from the Object Tool and select seed 1. After I have shrunk it down and formed it the way I would like it to lay, I made a Material for it and named it "Rock", selecting a dark grey and selecting a bump texture called "simple turbulence". This gives the rock a gorgeous rough texture.
Snowman Base.
Just the same as the Snowballs; used the snow material, made the sphere editable, live selection tool and then deformed it with the magnet tool. However, the snowman base is actually a semi-circle, or how you would like to call a Hemisphere in 3D terms. I wanted this so that when I added the texture it wouldn't stretch out around a sphere but instead, around a hemisphere instead.
The Scarf.
The trickiest of them all, I decided to do the scarf above the snowman base, as it will be there through out the animation. I first started off with a free hand spline and did the grooves and shape of a scarf. After I had did that, I placed the spline into a Lathe NURB, creating a circular cylinder which turned out to look like a scarf (But to make it editable I clicked the "make object editable" button). I wanted to change the shape of it, to make it more flexible, so I reshaped it with the Magnet Tool, selecting bits and pieces to reshape it.
All done! The stage is set for the animation to begin.
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