Late as usual 🏳️‍⚧️さんのイラストまとめ

Secondly we don't have strand length/particle age. Here though just using distance to the center (using object space coords) is good enough, nice and simple

The hills are really basic grass meshes thrown together quickly. Density distributed closer to the camera to cut down on cost a little (still takes ~5s for a 4k render though, clouds+grass makes it pretty slow lol)
Some grass meshes duplicated to nudge probabilities

swoooosh

the shader uses that thing with the tangents to make it viewable from most angles, doesn't work along the curve so well but it's good enough

Aside from checking intersection with the portal, it just checks if we're in front of it (so moving it behind it outside will still make it invisible lol)
Behind the portal the alpha gradually fades out,
With a separate alpha for shadows as it passes through

I can't really break it down, it's very hacked together; the flakes are a cell fracture + cloth sim (open meshes are a massive pain with cell frac)
There's a shader transition underneath as well to help hide gaps in the fracture

A small tangent, using voronoi displacement on volumes makes some interesting shapes, maybe some floating ruins or something 🤔
definitely looks like a videogame level of some kind anyway

@kolupsy for example, something like this is only really doable with an isosurface, trying to displace geometry to this shape procedurally just isn't really doable (especially where it breaks into separate pieces, which ofc is impossible with only displacement ;)

This had a lot of potential to go much further but I ran out of steam pretty quick lol

For the muscle/bone growth stuff I handmade (sculpt + curves) the main section, then used some animnodes and particles to make the ligaments connecting to the outside