Blender Procedural Cracked Frosted Ice Material 🧊 ⛏️❄️

🌟 Product Overview

This product contains a Blender material for procedurally-generated frosted, cracked ice — tailored for an appearance like the one shown above with bumpy, frosty smudges; bumpy, indented cracks; and an overall translucent volume for the target object.

The material is created as a custom shader node group — making it easily configured, customized, duplicated, or extended to fit any of your needs 💪

✨ Key Features

🟣 Highly customizable controls for the frosty ice surface: base color, frost intensity, frost spot size, frost spot distortion, bump distance, and more!

🟣 Highly customizable controls for ice cracks: sharpness, jaggedness, heaviness, randomization, bump distance, base color, and more!

🟣 Layer weight blending logic for more realistic translucency at the edges of objects.

🟣 Support for rendering in Eevee with Screen Space Reflections and Refraction enabled.

📦 Contents

• A Blender file containing:
  • The procedural material and its self-contained, customizable shader node tree.
  • A clean, well-architected tree of nodes that frequently includes frames and names describing their intent. 
  • A starter palette of sample colors for the base ice color.
  • A starter palette of sample colors for the ice cracks.
  • A demo of the material’s usage — with a number of different objects showcasing how it might be applied.
  • A “studio” setup with lighting, multiple cameras, and multiple backdrop surfaces to experiment with.
  • An environment-lighting setup with multiple “World” configurations to experiment with — each using different images, HDRI, light strengths, blending techniques, etc.
  • A Compositor setup with utility node groups for experimenting with different background images and glare effects.
• A collection of PNGs showcasing final renders from the demo.

🧩 Compatibility Notes

This material was built in Blender 3.5.1 and configured for both the Cycles and Eevee rendering engines.

📝 Usage Tips

Rendering in Eevee

In the render settings, with Eevee as the active engine, enable Screen Space Reflections, and make sure to toggle on Refraction.

(The included demo file is already configured in this way as well.)