Ice Frost Skill Vfx
Build the effects of an ice and frost skill as one visual language in Three.js.
Install
npx skills add MengTo/Skills --skill ice-frost-skill-vfx -g -a claude-code -y- Repository
- MengTo/Skills7.2k
- Category
- Engineering
- Updated
- 3d ago
- License
- MIT
- Context cost
- Mediumabout 3,000 tokens
- Runs scripts
- Yes, review before use
What it does
Build the effects of an ice and frost skill as one visual language in Three.js. Frost that grows like real frost, not a painted fern: a dendritic tree grown on the CPU from a seed point, stems racing outward with barbs and sub-barbs that compete for space in one time-ordered queue, side branches leaned toward their tips, baked into a distance field so the shader draws hairline feathers growing out from the seed with a bright tip, rime, crystal glints and a contact shadow. Faceted ice spikes built from half-spaces and ray-traced against their own planes (Snell, Fresnel, total internal reflection, Beer-Lambert blue, trapped bubbles, a fracture network, frosted edges) that erupt along the frost line, crack along visible planes and shatter into convex pieces that tumble, land on a face and rest, with snow lumps and ice chips settled into the crust. A low freezing mist marched as wind-stretched banks that churn in place and part around the ice, a blizzard column of powder on helical strands with a fibrous veil, glinting diamond dust, and a scanned snow floor with dunes, broken crust, a raking moon with self-shadow and two populations of glints. Use for ice or frost skills, frost novas, ice spikes or walls, glacial eruptions, shattering ice, blizzards, snow devils, freezing mist, frozen ground, "ice and frost", "frost creep", "ice shards", "realistic ice" or "skill effects only". Includes two reusable modules and a five-beat demo on a scanned CC0 snow floor with a failure-mode swit
Ice and Frost Skill VFX
Use this for the effect half of an ice or frost skill: what forms in the hand, what spreads across the ground, what erupts, what the wind does and what breaks. Reach for a sibling instead in these cases:
- Lightning, an energy orb, black afterimage smoke and air bursts:
lightning-energy-skill-vfx. This skill reuses its clock, composite, impact frames and flash limiter. - Flames, smoke, embers and burning ground:
fire-smoke-skill-vfx. - Readable, budgeted gameplay effects in general (telegraphs, status, cleanup rules):
create-game-vfx. Its readability rules still apply here. - Scoring a skill out of 10, or polishing the caster's body and timing:
game-dev-combat-skill-polish.
Source: a brief for elemental skill pages built to the Black Lightning demo's bar, with the notes the user gave on that demo ("not as in-your-face", "more fine lines", "smooth transitions", "a more realistic floor", "no sliding textures", "more detail in the shadows"). There is no character: the frost blooms in an implied hand at chest height. Then eight self-critique rounds, two rounds of review on the blizzard, and a three-round dream loop against GPT Image edits of the page's own frames (see references/scorecard.md).
Verified stack: Three.js r170, WebGL2, GLSL ShaderMaterials (one in GLSL3 for a two-target bake), HalfFloat render targets with a depth texture, a 96³ baked noise texture, and a hand-written bloom, composite and FXAA. No post-processing library. The demo's floor is Poly Haven's Snow 02 by Rob Tuytel (CC0), its 1k colour, normal and AO/roughness maps in demo/assets/ground/, embedded by demo/build.mjs as data URIs so the page opens from disk.
The mechanism
Frost is grown once and drawn by its arrival time; ice is traced against its own planes; the air is marched where the cold pools.
