Twilight Render User Forum

So, inspired by the "Take a sip" render by tuna57 I wanted to see if there's a good way to make realistic-looking ice cubes with TWR. From the renders that I've seen (not only on this forum), the ice cubes usually end up looking too dark, too murky, too clear or simply looks like chunks of glass. After a few hours of trial and error, I ended up with what you see here. It's by no means perfect, but it's definetly getting there
Or at leas't that's what I'd like to think

Now, ice by itself has a rather complex structure, and ice cubes (unless made under controlled conditions) will have defects in them such as bubbles, cracks and so on. My method for recreating that was to physically model the interior structure, which gives a decent result but is a bit intensive on the polycount, especially if you have a lot of ice cubes.

I made the cube itself by stacking 2 instances of it, one was a volumetric material and the other glass. The volume was intended to give a foggy look the the ice cube, but it didn't really add any visible effect. But without it the glass looked wierd so I decided to keep it regardless (this was pointless now that I think of it, since I ended up using Progressive 04 (MLT) for rendering which as far as I know doesn't support volumetrics). The bubbles inside have the same material as the second cube. Exact specs for the materials are:

Cube 1:
Volumetric, IOR: 1.000, Density: 10.000

Cube 2:
Glass, IOR: 1.220

Rendered with Progressive 04 at 10 passes.

I'd really like to see if anyone has a better way of doing it, so feel free to post your methods and ideas, maybe we'll learn something new, who knows!

RTD, I like your approach here. Will have to do some experiments along this line of attack...

Best Ice cubes I've seen, RTD. For a moment I thought it was one of the stock images I did in my kitchen...

There may be room for improvement, but I wouldn't know where to start. What you've achieved there looks photo real to my eyes. Great work!

You end up with a good result RTD.
Ice cubes is not something that deserves too much configuration to my point of view, except for macros like this.

best ice cubes I've seen in Twilight! Excellent model, lighting, materials. Just perfect!

I cannot get much of a result and having tried many alternatives a combination of water and pool water is the closest. Lost renders when Windoze decided to act on an update.

Mike1158 wrote: ↑Sun Jan 07, 2018 7:21 pm Lost renders when Windoze decided to act on an update.

I had the same problem and lost work for 2 days.

OK, have been playing with this and the result was a little surprising, a two piece ice cube, the outer group is assigned the finish 'water' and the inner 'gum'.

Interesting, I never really thought of using something more opaque for the interior, but gum seems to look pretty ok. And it's not as resource-demanding as what I did, well done!

Thanks Andrew, just an offshoot from the inspiration you gave. Every idea needs a little inspiration, thanks.