This article covers the texture creation process for the ice material, that I made for my portfolio piece "Ahri Northern Lights AoE ability": https://davidlindberg8.artstation.com/pages/ahri-aoe
Coloring:
I wanted to be able to iterate on the colors directly inside of Unreal Engine, which means everything exported from Substance Designer is all considered greyscale.
Shape language:
Ice surface:
To work well with a stylized aesthetic, I wanted to use simple shapes without too much minute detail. I settled on using hexagons in a tile sampler to create the "ice flakes" look:
This created a nice base look which both breaks up the straight lines from the hexagons while also providing a little bit of extra highlights, seen here alongside the AO derived from this texture:
Snowflakes:
To add a little more flavor to the surface I created a few different snowflake patterns:
From the examples above, I took the last three frames (the three different snowflake variants) and fed them into a tile sampler, to create a frosty surface like this:
By combining this with the ice texture from before, I can create a mask for highlighting "snow peaks" and giving a bit of color variety across the surface:
Cracks in the ice:
The cracks in the ice needed to go from having small fragments in the center, to larger pieces towards the edges. The best way to do this is with the Distance node. By grouping dots closer together near the middle and further apart near the edges, the resulting output from Distance becomes increasingly larger fragments:
By using Flood Fill and Flood Fill to BBox Size, we can get a gradient color increase from the center. This allows us to mask out specific tiles with Histogram Scan, so we can do things like reducing the sizes of the cracks on the inside- or outside pieces, then put them back together with the opacity mask:
The cracks are combined with a bit of noise and blur to fake the light "bleeding" through the ice material:
The directional light tilt on the cracks is done with another Flood Fill and Flood Fill to Gradient, but this time with a spherical shape as the slope input, to make the cracks look as though they are tilted out from the center of the impact:
