**These are just tests, not finished art** In the very early days I set about exploring what kinds of illusions we could reasonably get out of our material system for something closer to a translucent-seeming ice. I wanted to use this to profile performance costs, determine the simplest ways for us to do it, and to generate a list of tech requests for consideration.
These just use some stand in textures, parallax, offsetting, and SSS to fool the eye into thinking of the surface as translucent. Given time to mature across the project, I'm sure I could have gotten far better results than these tests.
Displayed in a testbed made by Erik Jakobsen who was also exploring ice for something more like a frozen lake.