How do you get ice cracks that fade with depth?

In the beginning of this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=ZL695WnJvmU&feature=emb_title
is some really nice ice that has these cracks that concentrate below the surface, bend at various 3D angles and fade down with the depth. I don’t know if that’s some special subsurface scattering or volume, but I can’t be the first person to ask how to make ice like that, is there a conventional way for youtube neglected to bring up for some reason?

It’s a parallax occlusion material. Link for it is in the same videos description. Texture link is there too.

You can do it with volumes too, but in eevee the volumetrics are pretty soft by default and it’s pretty performance heavy in cycles. Best way to do it with shader tricks like POM.

Also in Cycles you can just put meshes inside another and for ice it can work well enough to add depth, but for eevee stacked objects with SSR don’t work well as it can only do SSR on the first object.

I meant more making it from scratch, not downloading a jpeg.

The texture linked is not a jpeg, but a node group that sets up the parallax occlusion mapping. It’s a way to transform the texture coordinates based on a height map to emulate the depth.

If you wanna make something like this from scratch, maybe check this out:
https://learnopengl.com/Advanced-Lighting/Parallax-Mapping
It explains the principles and the math behind the effect.

If you wanna have more insight into how to set this up via nodes, the best way is probably look at already existing setups like the one you posted or this setup by Simon Thommes.

No it’s exactly a jpeg. You plug the jpegs into the parallax to accentuate the depth effect from different angles. Not that it seems to be entirely capable of what I thought it was anyway, but it looks cool.

You can do it volumetrically - it’s not fast though

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