I was required to do a logo for someone which consisted of an ice cube with a stone frozen into it. We had found a stock photo of an ice cube but it was a lot of money for something which I figured I might be able to create in Cinema 4D.

The end result looks pretty convincing, I think, so I decided to post a small tutorial in the hope that it would be of use to someone else.

Creating the cube

Create a cube primitive, choose Make Editable.

Select the polygon tool, select all faces of the cube and choose Structure > Subdivide with a value of 3. This will give you a cube with 64 polygons per face.

Now you can begin modeling the ice cube. You can start off by doing a Structure > Edit Surface > Crumple with a value of 15m on all polygons. This will give you an uneven surface.

Now create a Hypernurb and drag the cube into it. You will see the smoothed ice cube shape. You may need to tweak the surface polygons later to make it look more realistic.

The ice material

Create a new standard material. Set the parameters as follows:

Colour – a light grey with a slightly blue tinge, 80% brightness.

Transparency – same colour as above, 90% brightness, Refraction n1.3, Fresnel on.

Reflection – colour dark grey, 20% brightness.

Environment – brightness 100%, image is BhodiNUT 3D noise with settings as the screengrab shows:

Specular – Plastic, 37%, 25%, 0%, 0%

Displacement – Strength 50%, height 5 meters, texture BhodiNUT 2D noise with settings as the screengrab shows:

Tweaking the ice cube for realism

You should now have a fairly good looking ice cube. You will need to have a floor colour which is not white, anything else works fine, create a sky object with a sky material applied and set up a couple of lights.

You can see that it is looking pretty good. The only thing left to do is to manually select polygons and drag them around. The basic crumpled cube does so much but real ice cubes are more random – knock the corners in a bit and create some bumps and dips with greater depth. Soon you will have one great looking ice cube!

You can download the ice texture here.

Update January 2008

Seeing as so many people visit this page, I will try and put up other C4D tips, but I guess it would be worth me upgrading to the latest version first. If there are any specific things  you’d like to see please let me know. Bear in mind I’m more likely to put up stuff about textures than about modeling.

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