UE4 Lake Ice Materials / Breakdown
This is a quick weekend material project which were inspired by my trip to Baykal lake and gorgeous ice that I saw there. I've made master material with two instanced variants of Lake Ice and one simple cheap Snowy Ice mat that uses only one input map.
Main goal of that project were to create a material that have maximum customization flexibility with good visuals yet have minimum memory budget and fewer instructions count. It have world space align mode and UV mode.
Textures are 512x512 in size and BC7 compression. However even 256x256 size with BC7 holding fine visual quality thanks to using tiling detail noise. Unfortunately DXT1 making huge quality impact to normal red and green channels because of high frequency noise in blue channel.
Seaweed Warping
Environment Panning
Environment Panning
Material Abilities
Material Abilities
Simple Snowy Ice Material Instance
Simple Snowy Ice Material
Simple Snowy Ice SD graph
Lake Ice Material Instance
Lake Ice SD graph for main texture
Lake Ice SD graph for secondary texture
Lake Ice textures channel packing
Lake Ice Material
Couple of useful function I used that can be handy for you.