3dsmax 2013 and Octane Render.
I showed this one to my design instructor, and he didn't believe me at first that this was not created with a particle system. Actually, it's not. I discovered how to do some really amazing parametric modeling tricks from a guy over at Evermotion recently. This one is really amazing. It's an array of boxes formed into a cube (not so thrilling at first) with some bevel on the faces of each box, and chamfered edges. Then, using instancing and parameter wiring, each box in the array is controlled universally by another box with an FFD modifier on it (or any modifier that controls deformation, like bend, twist, etc). So to create some amazing effects to the array of smaller boxes, all you need to do is push and pull on the FFD box, and then all the smaller boxes in the cube array follow the deformations of the FFD box parametrically! It's a little complicated at first to wire the parameters and link the hierarchy, but once that's done, the effects you can get to the array just by altering one single object is amazing, and no particle system or scripting is required.
For the rendering, I used the Max to Octane plugin to translate the scene to Octane, and applied a bunt glass material to the boxes, and rendered with HDRI environment. Took this to about 3500 samples per pixel, and only took about 55 minutes to render with PMC sampling.
Sta.sh
