Letting it Snow

After inserting a snowy-sounding music into the game, I decided to give a shot at making the game look somewhat snow-covered. The first step was to make a dynamic snow material; the way that that is created in the Material Editor in Unreal involves taking the brighter portions of a material and amping them to white. This, unfortunately, was not too well explained in the tutorial I looked at, but did involve clamping values to ensure no negatives either. After applying the snow material, there was another section involving tessellation to make it look as if snow was covering the actual mesh in large clumps. This, however, did not work too well, as the way from 4.3 must differ immensely from what I actually got:

Ditching the tessellation, I decided a more particle-based approach would definitely work out instead of a brushing post-processing effect. The Unreal Engine 4 particle effect example's blizzard effect was similar enough to what I was looking for, brushing the snow particles quickly with different speeds along a vector field. However, I was also trying to figure out how to cover snow on the entire maze (at any size) all while actually showing particles. I tried attaching the emitter to the player, but barely any particles showed up. After awhile, I just decided to populate the entire area with particles and increase the initial location. This almost worked, but not a lot of particles still showed up until I amped up the graphics setting; it may not look it too much below, but snow fairly blows along the whole maze without too much of a drop in frame rate:

Also not shown are the spikes; due to the white area making the chrome hard to see, I gave the general color of the dangers a dark red. Next up? Not sure; school starts up in a couple of days and will probably take over this site (also explains why I haven't been able to post in the past couple of days). Perhaps areas that slow or speed the ball?