Mental Ray ice and snow

[Maximus]

Hey guys,
i'm working into a personal shader library since a bit of time and i'm collecting shader i've made (probably i'm gonna release to community), now i'm trying to getting a good results on shading those two stuff, ice and snow, i'm pretty satisfied with snow right now and moved to working with ice, wonder what you think about the result, here it is:



cheers, Max

[Hirazi Blue]

Looks good. Could you tell us some more about the specifics of the shader (what you did to achieve this look)?
;)

[Maximus]

well, snow is made with subsurface shader, and other 2 principal shaders to control the flakes and the specular, a little of bump for large surfaces done with enhance xsi shaders, render time is surprisingly great for this shader, here you can check the tree:



Ice is a bit more compicated because involves transparency and its a pain to handle on preview to get the right look, i've basically use a normal setup but played a lot with the distance fallof on refraction, here is the tree:



made a bit of post to enhance the sparkling and the overall contrast.

thanks

edit:forgot to add, illumination is just sIBL with sun, no other lights

[Hirazi Blue]

Thanks for the insight, I'm looking forward to further developments... ;)

edit: BTW - Autodesk should consider buying the Enhance:XSI textures.
They are really useful!

[shadow_ex_]

great^^ thanks a lot

[ActionArt]

Hey Maximus,

That's looking pretty darn good. And I come from a land of ice and snow so I speak from experience. We have about 1 meter of it outside right now and getting more as I type

Great work!

BTW - Autodesk should consider buying the Enhance:XSI textures.
They are really useful!

And I agree completely with this. They're so important SI shouldn't ship without them. I sure hope they stay up to date and don't disappear.

[Maximus]

thanks for comments! i actually made those shader for a bigger project i'm doing so we'll see later how they turn out!
regarding enhance xsi shaders i agree they should be implemented, or at least revamp the procedural textures since they are totally obsolete and few compared to any other 3d package.

I never use the XSI ones, they are kinda messy and limited to me, that said, enhance shaders dont cost that much so i think they are really a must to have! The only thing is they dont work well with Architectural material for some reason, thats why i use mia_material or mia_material_x.

This is another thing i dont get at all, the snow shader has an amost instant render time, i really got shocked, i tried using the other compounds for SSS_skin or SSS_fast + architectural and render time drops by a lot!
I'm tryin to move to using those native mental ray shaders at the moment because they react so damn well..
Again the snow shader has lots of stuff going on, bump, reflections, other 3 mia_material_x piped in, and render time is stunning.

Kinda dont have time to figure out whats wrong with Architectural or SSS!

cheers

[Mathaeus]

This is another thing i dont get at all, the snow shader has an amost instant render time, i really got shocked, i tried using the other compounds for SSS_skin or SSS_fast + architectural and render time drops by a lot!
I'm tryin to move to using those native mental ray shaders at the moment because they react so damn well..
Again the snow shader has lots of stuff going on, bump, reflections, other 3 mia_material_x piped in, and render time is stunning.

Kinda dont have time to figure out whats wrong with Architectural or SSS!

cheers

Well, by looking into your render tree, it seems you forgot to add some nodes to misss_fast setup.
It's faster of course, because there is no any subsurface scattering, actually.

Cheers

[Maximus]

well yeah, i didnt want any scatter effect, but since i'm still learning and sometimes i get lost in those nodes, when i was using skinSSS and simpleSSS even without lightmap wrote without scattering had insane render time, i think there is something going on with the EXSI enhance shaders, wich again i dont really have time to find out because its endless :/