Inspired by the thoroughly sinister art of Swiss artist H.R. Giger (known for his work on "Alien" and "Species"). The starting point was an attempt to produce a 'Giger' texture. To do this, I used PhotoShop to draw black lines of differing thickness on a transparent background, then copied the result, pasted it back in as a new layer, distorted it, and repeated until I finally had several such layers all overlaid. I then flattened the image, embossed it, Gaussian blurred, and embossed again before importing it as a PICT texture. The result is ... well, not quite what I wanted, and certainly nothing like Giger's stuff, but suitably alien anyway. I should probably increase the bump height to make this stuff stand out more.

I had more success with the ribbed pillars in this image. This is another PICT texture, made of simple alternating black/white lines which were embossed and blurred. Applied to the columns with a suitably large bump height, they actually look relatively Giger-esque.

Light for the scene comes from an overhead spotlight which shines through a circular hole chopped in the 'roof' with a negative Boolean cylinder, and from small green lights inside each of the translucent 'eggs'. The scene itself is built from Bryce primitives - stretched spheres and blocks - with a few Poser figures tucked in here and there to make it nastier.

Kai Krause talks about "thousands of little Macs creating beauty". Well, Kai, there's one here that's being used to create horror.

These are the textures used, saved as JPEGs.

Ribbing texture (JPG) [1K]

Giger texture (JPG) [8K]