The warping ball in the center of the flower is bump-mapped simple noise. The bowl was created using CSG. The marble is a 3d procedural texture using Perlin noise to perturb veins of black within the off-white stone (notice how the veins are continuous in 3d space and how cutting the sphere out of the bowl doesn't effect the continuity of the marble). The other effects on the spheres are variations on noise: absolute value and fractal sums.
Animation was done with a perl script and took 10 computers 25 minutes and one human five hours to render. The script is use to change the perlin noise over time.
Download the animation [MPEG4, 1.08 MB].