Its the season for making icy frozen builds (especially with the Winter Festival coming up), so I thought I’d share a tutorial on how to create an ice texture for your builds. This is heavily based on a glass tutorial in the 3D Game Textures book I can’t stop talking about, but with some extra steps.

You can start this texture from scratch by filling a plain color layer with 7% noise, but using a photo of a metal base works well and adds a little extra variance in the end result. I grabbed a scratched metal from Mayang texture, brought it into photoshop, and resized it to 512×512.

  • Duplicate this metal layer and go to Filter > Noise > Add Noise: 7%.
  • Filter > Artistic > Dry Brush: brush size: 9, brush detail: 1, texture: 1
  • Filter > Distort> Glass: distortion: 6, smoothness: 3, scaling : 166%
  • hit D to set default colors to black and white
  • Filter > Render > Clouds
  • Hit Ctrl+Shift+F to fade the clouds filter to 25%
  • Filter > Blur > Gaussian blur: 1.5
  • Filter > Artistic > Fresco: all settings to max
  • Ctrl+Shift+F to fade the fresco filter to 15%, set the blend mode to Multiply

OK! Now you’ve got your base ice, it should look something like what’s below.

Its pretty dirty looking, but we can do some things to pretty it up.

Duplicate the layer (I’m big on duplicating layers so you can go back if you mess up a step) and go to Edit > Hue/Saturation: check the Colorize box, then Hue: 194, Saturation: 29, Lightness: +19. Those are just the settings I used, but go nuts, play with the settings until you find what you like.

I like making my ice look lit up from the back, so if you want to add that effect, duplicate your layer again and go to Filter > Render > Lighting Effects, and use the settings below:

Finally, a last optional step is to make the sides look like they’re slightly denser and refracting the light differently from the center. To do this, add a layer style to your lit layer and use the settings below for Inner Glow:

There you go! A quick and flexible way to make ice textures for your SL builds. Try tweaking the steps to make your ice clearer, dirtier, rougher or smoother. You can also make a great base for an ice wall this way.