Experiment done in Blender with the goal of recreating an illustration I made in May 2019. Learned a lot about sculpting, 2D texturing, and smoke simulation!

The highlight areas were painted on by hand and emphasized with the bloom filter in Blender. The background dots were created in MASH in Maya using a gradient map for the size and displacement, then imported into Blender. The lighting effect was created using an animated curve displaced with noise and then skinned to create a mesh.