>>51106822You're close. It's actually a trick involving the direction normals are facing. Normals, in CG, are essentially what tells the renderer which direction a polygon is facing (the blue lines in pic related). If you change the direction, light will reflect off it as if it were facing that direction. It's usually used to give the user more control over how shadows are rendered (for example, if you a character's face to be shaded out even though it doesn't make sense lighting-wise, you can turn the normals downward to get that effect without having to change the geometry).
What they're doing here is using a map (basically a texture) to calculate the direction of the normals instead of using the actual normals. Notice that Pikachu's silhouette isn't actually jaggy at all, even though the balloons are, because Pikachu's polycount hasn't changed. Creating the crystal Pokemon is as simple as writing a plugin that automatically generates the map based on the model's geometry and writing the lighting engine to work with it. Then it's a simple matter of adding a material to get the prismic rainbow and glossy shine.
