Unity Shadergraph Cracked Ice Effect

What the talk is about

Jens Wiechering walks through building a realistic cracked ice surface in Unity Shader Graph (HDRP, Unity 2019.3). First the cracks are pushed down into the ice with a parallax effect, offsetting UVs along the tangent-space view direction. To avoid copying nodes ten times, he writes a Custom Function node with a short piece of shader code and an iteration loop, where deeper layers become more transparent. He then adds normal and smoothness maps, dirt clouds inside the ice (parallax driven by noise), snow patches with their own normal and roughness so they show no reflections, and a noise term that makes crack depth uneven. The textures tile, so large surfaces stay cheap. Useful for technical artists and developers writing shaders in Unity.