It’s basically using a modifier at the bottom of the stack to create geometry, which you could then just apply to edit the mesh directly, though that’s not always necessary. This is a bit similar to how Max and Cinema 4D work. When you add an object, you can still manipulate dimensions, resolution, other parameters as a whole. Then if you want to edit it manually, you convert it to an editable mesh with a click.

Above are some screencasts of what I did in Blender. Obviously it’s simple and rough, and if developed further, one could do things to clean it up like disable those generator modifiers from appearing in the menu, change the add object code to apply the generator modifiers automatically, prevent them from being moved up and down the stack, and perhaps add some code that upon pressing Tab, would give you the option to apply that modifier and just convert it to a mesh so you can edit it. In any case, this could serve as some kind of inspiration for something nice in the future…

[1] Basic render	[2] Baked UV map	[3] Margin settings

Now just load that image up as an image texture on your model’s material. You can do this without saving or packing the image since it’s still in memory, but if you don’t, it’ll be lost when you next load up that blend file, so you might as well save it. The next step is to blur this image, to fake the light scattering around under the surface. You can do this in Photoshop or something, but the easiest way is to just raise the ‘Filter’ value in the image texture [4]. This sets the width of the sampling area for when the pixels are looked up during texture mapping, and is pretty much the same as blurring the image. Switch on ‘Gauss’ to use Gaussian filtering instead of the box filter. Gaussian is much softer and doesn’t leave stepping artifaces with large filter sizes like Box does. It can also help to switch off MipMaps, though this will slow down the render as a tradeoff.

Finally, you’re going to be using this image texture to provide the lighting on your object, so first turn down your diffuse shader’s reflection value (usually ‘Ref’), give this texture a UV mapping, and turn up ‘Emit’ so the material is self illuminated by the texture. There are a few ways you could go about this such as mapping the texture to affect the ‘Ref’ channel, but what I’ve done in these examples is to turn down Ref to about 0.15, Emit up to about 0.85 and map the texture to the Color channel.

Render, and there you have it [5]! I gave it a try on my recent sculpt model, and it looks interesting there too [6]. For some situations, this works just fine, but it’s only really practical for things like skin, since it’s just blurring. It won’t handle real translucency, like light coming through a leaf.

[4] Filter settings	[5] Suzanne rendered with the effect	[6] Applied to a sculpt model

The good thing about this technique, unlike the toon shader/shadow buffer method, is that it lets you use a standard lighting and material setup. This technique isn’t view dependent, so it will be fine in animations like flyarounds, as long as the model or light sources aren’t moving. Perhaps it would be possible to get it working in animation by means of a script - i.e. for reach frame, do the bake render, and since you’re already using that image as a texture, it should go fine. Of course this is still a cheesy hack, so bring on the real thing!