Curvy Torus

Going into this I was wanting to make a 'curvy torus' sort of like is in the default geometry in blender, but in Houdini. It was pretty easy with a tube and some deformers, but I wasn't coming up with any really impactful visual ideas (some are coming to me now with making a crystal looking thing, so maybe I'll keep that in my back pocket). I still liked the idea of 'curvy torus' so I thought I'd head back into pop land and use a circular curve force to make a 'curvy torus' out of some particle trails. That's pretty low hanging fruit that I know would look good, but the magic came when I brought it into Blender for rendering. After playing around with the shader a little bit I did an experiment and changed 'Random Walk' to 'Christensen-Burley' and that's what gave us that magical translucent/subsurface look. Definitely a look that I've been wanting to have a better way of achieving and now I know just how easy it is! Be sure to watch out for a gratuitous use of that in future OADs. Discoveries like this are really what the exercise is all about. OH also adding that little light source in the middle in photoshop to help balance things out was good design practice. I definitely wouldn't have been brave enough to do something like that in a 'real' project.