So why doesn't Joy look like a cloud of glitter?

Pete Docter: "They're made of energy--they're made up of thousands of particles, which kind of looks like energy." The obvious build, sparkles on a solid body, reads as glitter on a person; Pixar's Angelique Reisch wanted "her to feel like energy, not like she had particles on top." Joy appears in "over 750 shots" and "needed to feel like a magical effect, but work and react as dependably as a more traditional character." The answer, in Pixar's own talks: she "was actually made up of many, many particles, many so small that in aggregate she looked like a volume": "a core volume that behaved and illuminated as a glowing surface, moving particles that hovered over it, an edge volume ... and strands of dots that resembled hairs from a distance but sparkles up close." One dial set each Emotion's look, which Pixar called solidity: Anger the most solid, Joy so much a volume her wrist is see-through.

Our own figure, built as a soft volume with points and dots in code; no frames from the film and no Inside Out character.

Which Emotion would you build most solid?

Sources: Angelidis, Merrell, Moyer and Reisch, "Developing Joy for Inside Out", SIGGRAPH 2015 Talks; Lacaze et al., "Familiar Feelings: Emotion Look Re-Development on Pixar's Inside Out 2", SIGGRAPH 2024 Talks; Inside Out production notes (Disney/Pixar, 2015); Barbara Robertson, "A Frame of Mind", Computer Graphics World, 2015; Mike Seymour, "Inside Out Rendering", fxguide, 2015.
Sounds: our own, made in code (earshot, CC0).