The Apple Project... a glimpse into the creative process. 
By Steve Lareau, 
Hilltop Design
Clinton, Tennessee

This is one of the first test images I came up with, but after some experimentation with it, I realized that the apple model wasn't usable at all- it's hard to see here, but it had some bad areas on the mesh. It just didn't have enough polygons to be able to smooth it out enough to make it usable. And since the final images needed to be rendered at 2300 by 1725, every small flaw would be very obvious.
I tried to get more of the "special effects" into this one to try to work around the bad model. But it just didn't work. 
Another variation on a theme, with an "Apple Imac Color" on the apple, and this time with some tweaked textures on the torus. Needless to say, this was a bad idea.  Time to take this one out back and bury it in a very deep hole. 
Another version sitting in the middle of a volumetric slab- although I like the material itself, it's too distracting for this application. Back to the drawing board.
Same apple, different color.  It's sitting in the middle of three progressively larger spheres with a custom material I cooked up. Close, but no cigar.
 Now we're back to the original apple model- I'm trying to use the wisps to hide the bad edges on the model, but the diagonal band across the face of the apple caused problems with the anaglyph. 
Same scene, some tweaking was done to the sphere materials. Again, it's just not working well. But one cool thing I liked about this one was the faint squiggles seen in the upper left corner. 
I'm still trying to get this idea to work, but it's just not coming together. The bright yellow stuff is actually making the problems with the apple model more obvious.
Another tweak- it just didn't come together at all, although as a design element, I do like the feel of the sweeping yellow bands. It really has a feel of movement to it.
Here's... wait- didn't I just bury you out back a little while ago? Like the goofball I am, I went back to see if I could get this bad idea to work. As you can see, the more I messed with it, the more it simply sucked. When *will* I ever learn... this one kept coming back to haunt me over and over as I worked on this project.
 

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