A bunch of spheres that try to stay together -but not too together-, with soft shadows and ambient occlusion.
Move your mouse and the spheres will follow. Click so they separate, they'll group back when you release.
More details...
This one is the result of testing a combination of techniques.
The sphere-sphere ambient occlusion is analytically found following Iñigo Quílez's Sphere Ambient Occlusion.
The soft shadows are part of the raymarching toolbox at ShaderToy and IQ's Modeling with Distance Functions.
The rendering combines solid color, some lambertian diffuse term, ao, soft shadows and rim lighting.
The motion is an ad-hoc steering behaviours that doesn't really work that well.
The spheres use a custom LOD system, based on BufferGeometry and a custom version of three.js
I changed the background from white to black because the lighting is already fake, so let's make it look different :)
Credits
Sphere AO code recycled from this old effect of mine AO Boids (the boids were much better there, but unfortunately they're not framerate independent)