Fun fact: One of the advantages of having a pov style camera is that you can add in random blinking to hide any graphical glitches.

I watched Soul Eater when I was a kid on an obscure cable channel that simulcasted to a bunch of europian countries at night. As a result, half of the episodes were in the wrong language, which made for an... unique viewing experience.

Cant that be done by raycasting from each point in its normal direction?

Not at the moment, sorry.

Thanks! Procedural animations are bit hard to pull off in Blender sadly. I tried to do a bit of fake caustics at least, but to do it for real I would have to render with a path tracer. And those dont play well with the toon shading (and would increase the render time by couple of months).

For the elongated parts I use geometry nodes to generate the geometry along curves and merge it with the main mesh. The rig controls the points of the curve and uses drivers to let me add/remove them as needed.