Previous Frost Shader Approaches

There are a couple of frost related work today but the fact is they are always used in visual effect scenes( e.g. Rise of the Guardians, The Day after Tomorrow, Narnia the Lion witch and the Wardrobe and the latest one from Disney's Frozen. All of these feature films showcase some kind of snow accumulation and ice crystal formation. Example in the Disney's Frozen it features a ice crystal growing and turning into a huge castle. But the most intriguing I think is Dreamworks Rise of the Guardians which showcases Jack frost and its ability to create phenomenal frost pattern in solid lakes and windows.

         


The Rise of the Guardian Film was actually featured in a 2013 Siggraph paper. In which the paper talks about Cellular Automata to model the animating growth of the frost and then using Curve to generate the scattering of the frost pattern.

http://dl.acm.org.v-ezproxy.smu.ac.uk/citation.cfm?id=2504459.2504479&coll=DL&dl=ACM&CFID=283020813&CFTOKEN=44873710

There a couple more example of how to model frost but as we know there are different kinds of frost and these paper talks about specific ones. Example the one below talks about visual simulation of Glazed Frost, a Frost that actually creates a ice around a object. This was a very handy insight on my part but one the technique i was looking for.
http://delivery.acm.org.v-ezproxy.smu.ac.uk/10.1145/2510000/2503400/a14-ishikawa.pdf?ip=212.219.61.169&id=2503400&acc=ACTIVE%20SERVICE&key=C2716FEBFA981EF1AE9BA548B9F4B8578844D11695F731CC&CFID=283020813&CFTOKEN=44873710&__acm__=1389868807_5edb570b8164ec7e83dc4bf24e6907e3

Another amazing shot is the The Day After Tomorrow running frost in which the scene shows the frost spreading infecting the whole room.  This was mainly done in 3Ds max and was created using a mapped texture and animated and tweaked in OpenGL.
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/item?siteID=123112&id=4387869&linkID=14271594

Frost shader work from other people:

http://www.kai-w.com/renderman/frost_shader/frost_shader.html

https://facultypages.scad.edu/~mkesson/vsfx419/wip/winter07/matthew_burdette/frost/index.html

http://nccastaff.bournemouth.ac.uk/jmacey/MastersProjects/MSc09/Salas/mr_cool_ice_manual.pdf

All of the work mention above used renderman's rendering software and its language. Kai wang created an impressive shader that generates Barnsley Fern pattern within the RIB file and using a simple surface shader.
Matthew Burdette creates a simple shader within the surface shader and utilizing the noise function to create a distorted pattern for the frost.

There a few paper that talks about frost shader creation but there are tons of paper that talk about snow acuumulation and snow dynamics this might be handy but not useful of what i am trying to achieve. Surprisingly i came across a paper that talks about how to model venation pattern into a leaf and its algorithm is kind of applicable to how i can animate my frost.
http://delivery.acm.org.v-ezproxy.smu.ac.uk/10.1145/1080000/1073251/p702-runions.pdf?ip=212.219.61.169&id=1073251&acc=ACTIVE%20SERVICE&key=C2716FEBFA981EF1AE9BA548B9F4B8578844D11695F731CC&CFID=283020813&CFTOKEN=44873710&__acm__=1389870012_fd684bb2434fc066e7d5699ab9ad7957