I am making an ice shader for a group project, but it still doesn’t look enough like ice for us to use it. I’ve spent a lot of time on this shader trying to get it to work. It must be procedural within Maya. Does anyone have any advice for me, or can you pinpoint what property of ice is throwing it off? Thanks!
I need to have both thin and thick ice.
I think it looks pretty good, but I’m not sure what kind of Ice you are looking for.
^ This was my best guess on the look you want, in terms of your results it seems to be reflecting that very dark background, almost making the “thin” ice black.
And for “Thick” Ice it’s pretty much non transparent, like a glacier etc…sometimes aqua blue over a foggy white.
I was going for the ice you posted, but I just met with the head of the project and found out he wanted ice cube ice, specifically this:
…Kind of bummed, because it wasn’t what I had in mind for ice that shatters, and I don’t know how to get that foggy effect.
Yep, use the mia_mat_x, and also “Translucency” inside that shader will help. You may want to go as far as using SSS shaders, but you can make realistic ice without doing so.
Once you have the general look coming along, start swapping in ice texture maps to enhance the realism, in your diffuse and reflection/refraction channels, and also in your translucency channel.
I saw people using the mib_volume inside the transparency of an lambert.
mapped with some procedural noise… (believe me that’s damn hard to get a good look - but if so - it could look awesome).
that result could be plugged in the transparency of an mia or in the additional color.
also the mib_glossy_refraction does surface thickness calculation - try using it with amb_occ shader.
otherwise the mia with glossy refraction and falloff. if you go more advanced you can go for surface thickness calc. and ray-forward calc stuff. aswell for secondary ray tint calcs.
and or look through the binary alchemy shaders which has one ray op. shader for depth calculations. which aswell samples edges (edge detect). …sadly mentalgay in maya is the less developed renderer I’ve seen. when it comes to custom operations (xsi and renderman/ mantra/ 3delight/… include mathematical stuff (nodes) which is not accessible inside maya - other than writing your own shader).
but maybe I gave you an idea for further testing.
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