Let it Snow (or Rain)

Inspired by a tutorial of Guitta Bertaud I read a long ago I create falling snow using cylinders that I apply the Snow flakes material (Materials collection Special Effects) to that comes with Vue. The top view shows how the cylinders are placed. I decreased the material scale to get smaller snowflakes that are more dense as you can see in this screenshot.

Take care that you don't move the cylinders too close to the camera to avoid getting too big flakes. You can see the material scale I used on the right and the small render shows the result. Replace the Snow flakes material with the Rain material and you get a nice rain. Select all cylinders in the camera view and rotate them a bit to let the rain fall either from top right to bottom left or top left to bottom right.

Of course if it's snowing you want to have some snow on your plants too. There are several ways to get snow on plants. In this scene I used the fir that comes with Vue. In the material editor open the leaf material and change the overall color to white. That's what I did in this scene. You can also duplicate your original plant, change the overall color of the duplicate to white and rotate it slightly. That gives a mix of both. Or instead of rotating you can move the white plant slightly up to make it look as if snow is on top of the branches. I hope that helps to get started.