hi chaps, so I've been looking at shading a little closer lately and I really want to push the Principled Shader and see what it can achieve with very limited modification from the vanilla shader.

So I am starting with a snow scene.

I found a very nice image of an ice Utah Teapot frozen in snow on google and seemed like a nice place to start. So here is my rendition of a similar scene.

I'm concentrating on the ice shader first, the the snow secondly.

I had some advice quite a long time ago from tamte in regards to internal depth of ice (not sure if it was here or odforce), but since I have some time once again, I am returning to the fray.

Simple scene:

1: Displaced grid for floor. MountainSOP for main and shader displacements for secondary and tertiary.
2. Teapot is supposed to be shaded as a clear ice object with cloudy internal ice as found in most types of ice. Displacements are shader based and not geometry based.

The internal cloudy ice is not a mix of different shaders. It is a copy of the teapot. The size is reduced and turned into a volume via the isoffset node. An uniform volume shader has been applied to this, in conjunction with a volumevop node to create some noise in the density values.

The lighting is very simple.

1x Area light for the main lighting with the area sizes scaled up for soft shadows.
1x Environment light with the Bosch HDR that ships with Houdini, with a slight blue colour to tint the light a bit from grey.
1x spotlight. This one is only to accentuate the internal volume. The light mask and shadow mask is set to the volume only.

Any suggestions are welcome. I should have an update in the next day or so.

Howdy,
Can you share the scene file?

edit: Dang it! Someone forgot to subscribe to their own thread.