How to Make a Snow Material in UE5
Snow is bright but not white-hot, soft but glittering — a subsurface material pretending to be a simple one. Getting it right is mostly about restraint in the albedo and cleverness in the sparkle.
Channel by channel
Base color
Bright but NOT pure white — around 0.8–0.9 linear with the faintest blue tint. Pure 1.0 white albedo breaks lighting (nothing in nature reflects 100%) and clips to a glowing sheet.
Roughness
Fresh powder high (0.7–0.9); packed or icy snow drops toward 0.2 with footpath variation. Add micro-sparkle: scattered near-zero roughness specks, the same trick as sand but stronger.
Metallic
0.0.
Normal
Soft, rounded accumulation shapes — wind ridges, drifts against objects. Harsh high-frequency normals make snow look like styrofoam.
The hand-building tip that matters
If your version supports it, a touch of Subsurface scattering (or a fuzz/cloth term) with a pale blue subsurface color gives snow its characteristic soft glow at grazing light — the difference between snow and white plaster.
New to the four channels? Read the PBR basics first.
Or generate it in seconds
MaterialForge builds this material for you — seamless textures, derived PBR maps and the UE5 node graph, applied into your open editor in one click. The prompt is prefilled:
Generate “snow” in MaterialForgePrompt variations to try
Applying into your editor happens through the free Cosindra desktop app (Windows & macOS).