Water material with full controls over the size, shape, and speed. Can transform into ice with procedural frost generation.
I want to simulate the formation of ice on the Atlantic sea and movement of the water wave when the wind blowing across the surface. To achieve this, I came up with a plan to blend two materials, water and ice, together first.
For water, I will mix alpha textures and panner them at different speeds to create a Dynamic mask that will add more randomness to the wave.
For ice, I will use the Distance To Nearest Surface node to create procedural waves and Frost around the coast line.
I created this Ice material base on a tutorial I found online
Final result
I want to use just one slider to control the ice formation and deformation.
Using the base color B channel Map as mask for lerp and custom parameter to control the alpha
mask lerp0
mask lerp1
The parameter is very important since I will use it to lerp the ice and water material. Now it's only controlling the ice formation, but I want it to also to contorl the deformation of the ice as it turns into water.
Creating a basic water material using Single Layer Water Material and Water Normal map from Unreal Engine
Using a Blend normal note to blend two different speed of the same normal together
make another normal texture using the same method
Normal Map
Final result
Normal Map
Final result
I want a mask that can adjust its own density to simulate the randomness of the wave.
adding two alphas together then them panner at different speed and angle, use sine function to alternate between high intensity and low intensity
low intensity
high intensity
I added more parameter to control the texture size, speed, and intensity for the water and the mask. To adjust more details according to specific needs
The water is almost complete but still need a little bit of distortions to look more natural
I was using my old RGB noises to create the noises, then adding controls for future tunning, same trick of panner to blend two of the same texture to make it look more interesting
noise1
noise2
Before
After
Connecting the SAME custom parameter to lerp all the ice and water materials
This parameter is to control the intensity of the ice formation
This parameter is to control the intensity of the ice frost
The water is now complete and looks realistic. It can transform into ice using a single parameter slider and has many other settings to alter the speed, shape, and color of the water and ice
Show a video of the final tool in action