Local Extrude

Very pleased with this result. I was playing with recreating something a different artist made for a previous job that I thought could be done better / simpler (aka keeping the whole operation in geometry land and not converting to and from volumes which actually ended up creating some artifacts that never got caught / corrected in the final deliverables), but while I was troubleshooting extruding by attribute I changed from connected to individual components and got this really lovely little accident. Also the noise is being driven by attributes so it fades nicely.... Since I'm here and the final is rendering anyway the whole setup is a grid that had a mountian sop applied to it, then the points were pushed back down to y=0 gradually by attribute I called "influence" (thinking this through I sould have stored their original position in an attribute and then faded back to that, maybe another day I'll add that in). Then each face is extruded, inset, and twisted based on that same "influence" attribute. Nice when these happly little accidents actually have a place to go!