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Cracked Ice Shader (using Parallax effect) (Daniel Pokladek)

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Daniel Pokladek

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Description

Daniel Pokladek's January 2021 blog post builds a Unity cracked-ice material with parallax crack planes under a tinted surface, extending Binary Impact's Shader Graph ice tutorial toward Dragon Age: Inquisition-style stacked cracks, not one repeating layer.

Shader Graph work uses three parallax slices, surface offset, normal UV distortion, grayscale albedo tinting, and RGB-packed crack maps. The HLSL port is Built-in Standard with tangent-space view direction, a short parallax loop on packed channels, Shader Graph multiply blending, and roughness smoothness.

Intermediate Unity authors who know normal maps and basic parallax should use Binary Impact's video and Harry Alisavakis's parallax notes for omitted background.

Free online with screenshots, shader source, and a GitHub Unity project.

Useful for layered parallax ice with few layers and for porting Shader Graph to surface code.