I've always loved the idea of working with two dueling formal looks, and for this project, I wanted to make use of that. The idea of creating a system that could seamlessly move from a grid-like and almost voxelized look to a smooth aesthetic was really interesting to me, and moving between the styles while maintaining an overall feel was really fun. It was also a great chance to try out some shader ideas that involved working with Houdini's attributes and custom OSL.
Earlier versions used subsurface scattering, but it ended up being too expensive to use for the scope of this project.
The emissive material combined with the subsurface scattering created a bloom-like look that I really liked (at the cost of 5x the render times).
Here's the main shading network for the scene. What I'm essentially doing is passing in two different rest positions (one for each form of the geometry), and blending between them using a different attribute. To get dots in the center of each grid segment, I'm remapping the length of each segment to be 1, and then calculating the distance from its local center.
The smooth half of the look is much simpler, but getting them to blend smoothly between each other was pretty fun.
