3D Snow creation tips

Snowy scenes are a CG favorite, and there are many ways to make a realistic winter image, most of them pretty work intensive. The Bauhaus at Dessau winter scene, my first relatively large-scale snow scene at 12 million polys, was a bit of a learning exercise, and I ended up resorting to a patchwork of approaches gleaned from other CG artists and from my own experiments. Here are a few things I learned on the way summed into 5 tips.