Creating Natural Materials in Cycles - Blender 2.6 Cycles: Materials and Textures - page 101

Creating an ice material using

procedural textures

In this recipe, we will create a semi-transparent ice material.

Getting ready

Start Blender and load the usual blend file 1301OS_03_start.blend .

1. Delete the subdivided cube and add a new cube primitive.
2. In the Camera view, press Shift + F and by using the middle mouse button
zoom the camera to better frame the cube.
3. Select the background plane and delete it. Add a new plane, being still in
edit mode, scale it eight times bigger. Go out of edit mode and move it one
unit down on the z axis. Assign the Plane material to it.
4. Set the World color to black.
5. Select the cube, go in edit mode, and press W . In the Specials pop-up,
select Subdivide . Press T and in the bottom of the Mesh Tools panel set
the Number of Cuts value to 2 . Go out of edit mode and press T again to
hide the Mesh Tools panel.
6. Go to the Object Modifier panel and add a Subdivision Surface modifier.
Switch from Catmull-Clark to Simple and set the Subdivision levels to 5 .
7. Add a Displace modifier and in the Textures window click on New and
select a Voronoi texture; set the Size value to 1.20 . Back to the Object
Modifiers window, set the displacement strength to 0.050 .
8. Add a new Displace modifier, assign a Voronoi texture again but this time
set the Size value to 0.80 . Set the Displace strength to 0.075 .
9. Add a third Displace modifier, assign a Voronoi texture, and let the default
size ( 0.25 ) unchanged. Set the displacement strength to 0.020 .
10. Switch the Camera view to Rendered .

How to do it...

After the scene preparation, now we are going to create the material itself: