Sierpinski's Calm

Proof Of Concept I

Proof of Concept II

Oily

Final Presentation

For these renders I began by building the pyramid. I did this by creating a single square based equilaterally-sided pyramid. I then arrayed this in 2 dimensions using an offset of the length of a side of the square base. This created a 3x3 square of pyramids. Four of these were then instanced above and aligned so that the center of this layer aligned with the center of the other. A single one of these was then instanced above and aligned so each vertex of its base touched a point of the pyramids in the layer below.

This whole unit of 14 pyramids was then grouped, so that it could be treated as a single (pyramidal) object.

This entire process was repeated 3 times (only twice for the first 2 images), treating each constituate final group as a pyramid.

The result was 14^3=2744 separate base pyramids, i.e 2744x5=13720 faces/vertices.

I set up a simple mental ray lighting system, and also calculated the global illumination pass too. The results (due to the "spongey" nature of the model) appear to have a macroscopic sub surface scattering (SSS) effect.