My entry to the Science as Art 2018 festival held at Clemson. Walked away with first place! Rendered in Cackle using path tracing with Cook-Torrance shading.
'World Caliber' is a render of a 3D fractal called the Pseudo-Kleinian Menger. Everything in this image is defined by a mathematical equation. Fractals can be thought of as objects that continually complex; you can keep zooming in deeper and deeper and there's always more detail. They let us describe objects in a way that would otherwise be impossible with just simple geometry. Here, the fractal was made to look like an endless mass of gears, but it can easily be altered to look like the branching structures of plants or cells.