What material or method is this?

[glasscrane]

Hey! I recently came across this image, and I was wondering what material or method of rendering this could be.

[Esben Oxholm]

Could be some kind of particle driven curves.
You can probably do this in several applications, but here's how to do it in modo at least: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVsFUxiC-wk

After that you just need to export the geometry to KeyShot and some colorful materials.
Maybe adding gradient texture in the diffuse applied to all straws will help to achieve something close to what you link to.

Cheers,

[mattjgerard]

That can be done with x-particles as well, a particle system plugin for Cinema 4d. The particles are generated and put into motion, then a Trails generator will create the geometry of the "straws", and those straws can be treated as one large object or individuals. Most render engines would be able to distribute color across a group of objects like that. Or, if you are really digging deep, those colors could be driven by any number of time/speed/heat/birth/death variables, and baked into a map of some sort that is being used to drive the material color.

Lots of cool options.

[Will Gibbons]

As Esben pointed out, this can be done in many programs. I recently learned how to in Houdini. Basically, get a bunch of particles to go where you want them to and have them create splines/curves/trails, and then turn those into a mesh.