This is my entry to the winter 2012 OSU shaders poster. It uses cell noise in the displacement shader to generate the spines and point based occlusion to do the soft shadows.
I used an open source RenderMan renderer called Pixie to develop this project. Execute the following steps to build the project on your machine.
$ git clone git://github.com/strassek/torus.git
$ cd torus
$ make