houdini+notch
sin xsin ysin z + sin xcos ycos z + cos xsin ycos z+cos xcos ysin z
this expression creates a tiling surface with diamond edges.
the resulting surface is cloned in notch and lit so that the angle of each face was never 90 degrees to the light. the result was a collection of soft gradients, arrayed in space. these gradients were used to define a vector offset, creating a soft island topology effect. the resulting frame was fed back in as the surface array spins in space.