Gasper Znoj: Sketch #31 - Winter Mimics

[GasperZ]

My final submission:

Reference:
frozen glass

Gif of final submission:

Reference gif:

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Hi guys,
First time doing one of this contests Mine will be kinda boring since I’m making a frozen glass of water but I was intrigued by thinking about the shader I could make for this.
Here is the reference video for this FX:
frozen glass

My plan is to first break down each of the elements:

(There’s actually more then i wrote down but this are the main ones)

I will build each of those elements with their own parameters and use sliders turn on/off each element with blueprints.

The stretch goal is to hook up each parameter to a single slider. For example: I want the cracks to start when the first fresnel slider is at 0.5. I’m not sure yet how I will approach this. I’m thinking either Unreal material custom script or with blueprints.

[Lee]

great idea! excited to see what you come up with

[GasperZ]

Easy stuff first

[GasperZ]

Added a secondary layer for fresnel (freezing fx).
This gave me a much better result as you can see in the gif comparison:

Before:

After:

[GasperZ]

Adding ice cracks. All textures that I’m using are from a giant library that I have on my disk which has either my textures or something that I got on the internet. I’ll try my best to find sources for all the textures I end up using (if any) because most of them are place holders which I will later create in Designer.

[GasperZ]

Got most of the main elements done:

Just realized I need to calibrate my monitor at home so colors might be slightly off.

[Shr1mpsy]

I love your idea! You’re getting there, keep it up!

[sazberryftw]

Looking really cool i almost did this too

[ryvanc]

That’s coming along really nicely - all the layering in your shader is working quite effectively for the look

[GasperZ]

I’m excited to see yours! Looks like fun

[GasperZ]

Hi guys! Thanks for the kind words. I’ve been really busy for the past couple of days but I made some progress today.

I wanted to make everything inside of the material instead of using blueprints just as a challenge.
I went over every slider and wrote down the range I wanted for it. Then I used sin with some basic math to make it move in that range.
So in this example I wanted the first fresnel to go from 0.2 to 0.8. I connected this to exponent input:

For the ice cracks I wanted them to start when the glass is half way frozen. I used the IF node to tell the strength multiplier to stay at 0 until sin > 0.5.

[Shr1mpsy]

Water freezing shader, this looks so cool! Love the little detail pushing ice up. Also nice you got a solution doing everything in your material

[GasperZ]

I was working more on the top side of the glass to get the look of water turning to ice.

I added a cube map to fake reflection on top of the emissive channel.

Current graph:

There’s still a lot of improvements to be done like the better timing of individual elements. I’m in the final stages of this FX so any feedback is welcome. I’ll get the rest of the things done by next week. This has been very fun!

[GasperZ]

Got some time last minute to submit this I think I could indefinitely work on this glass. There are so many tiny details (nature is truly amazing ). Things I could improve on are are the cracks (they don’t feel powerful enough and could appear more gradually) as well as the second layer of fresnel.
But this has been very fun, ill definitely be doing more of this contests

HD video:

Final gif:

Reference gif:

I ended up using 8 textures but some of them could be packed in the same texture using RGB channels. Here is the final shader:

[Shr1mpsy]

You got so many details on this, great work!

[ryvanc]

Really nicely done, your match for the feel of the reference is pretty spot-on!
Thanks for the walkthrough of the layered shader system you designed as well, that’s really interesting to see. Great work all around

[GasperZ]

Thanks Shr1mpsy! appreciate it

[GasperZ]

Thanks a lot! My process was going for more of a mimic then recreation so I didn’t have to re-watch the video over and over but rather just try to capture the elements I broke down in the beginning. It was really fun to make