Ice Cube Realism
I'm stuck in the uncanny valley I think with my realistic ice cube renders. I'm attempting to produce this style of cube (wet)
Or this as a dry, frosted version
They are quite perfect shapes, but with minor imperfections and so I'm struggling to find any tuts out there that are like this. Most of them are for ice tray cubes, quite irregular, almost cubed shaped pieces of water, rather than strong glasslike pieces. I've even looked at examples of frosted windows but the detail isn't there. I'm using blender - Does anyone have any tips or approaches they would take to make something simple like this? I'm open to trying different software.
Here are a couple of my attempts I've posted:
Replies
As you've said, the cube primitives alone aren't going to cut it. It looks like you've got a lot of the micro detail there already, so I'd suggest deforming your base mesh in some way to bring in more of the macro shapes, either with sculpting or perhaps geometry nodes.
At the least your edges need to be a lot rounder and smoother.
Ice is also a volume, and there are imperfections in the way the crystals form and freeze that means light won't travel through it completely uniformly, the material properties will change at different points inside the volume (which is what contributes to that cloudy effect in your reference). You may want to try and mimic this property with your shading.
This may be an obvious question but have you studied some actual ice cubes and not just reference photos?