gsokol's work is really cool ! vertex painting is one option but I am looking into the vector displacement sculpting option purely for speed and or laziness depending on how you look at it. Some surprising results from mudbox at the moment just using the imprint sculpt tool a bit hit and miss because of the photos I am…
This was done using the "sculpt using map" function in mudbox. Next stage is to get the icicles into modo cut them out individually and mirror (will probably be an ass to do) for a full model of an icicel. I will doing more tightly clustered icicles but it requires a lot of PS work. Cheers