Life

A twenty face icosohedron is tessellated on the gpu through the use of tessellation shaders. Level of detail changes with camera distance. The smaller the camera's distance from a face, the more the face is tessellated. The sphere gains many new vertices through tessellation. These new vertices are perturbed with a 3d simplex noise function. This is what the icosohedron looks like with phong shading, bloom, and the noise function applied.

I found that the vertex normals do not look good if they are calculated per primitive. They cause the shape to look faceted.

If you calculate the vertex normal using neighboring points, it appears smoother.

This is the final colors with and without bloom.