The Information Superhighway
This image was submitted to the old comp.graphics.raytracing ray-tracing competition (the forerunner to the IRTC) in March 1995, and got first place! Comments from the original text file accompanying my entry:
Well, this image underwent a long, slow evolution. I started thinking about the topic, 'The Internet', which was really crying out for something cyberspacy as an image, even though the concept no doubt is becoming a bit cliche'd. I went through about four or five different designs of what I wanted to do, and then, one night, I suddenly wondered what a network packet really _looked_ like.
Well, tying this up with the whole 'information superhighway' politicobabble didn't take long, and so on paper I had a good idea of what I wanted to do. However, I was really unable to get a good 'tangled cable' effect with the tools I had (specifically Connect The Dots), and I though that a whole heap of joined torus sections might do the job better. I couldn't find a tool to do this, so I did the traditional thing and wrote one, TORPATCH. As might have been expected, writing the tool took more time than anything else about this image... I should release the tool sometime in the coming month, when I have made it sufficiently user-friendly :).
The rest of the image was composed entirely by hand.
The only problem I had then was to decide what lay at the end of the highway? The answer was obvious: Bill Gates, of course!
The Torpatch tool that is mentioned was, indeed, released.
