Experimental 3D art is quite a sight

You'd be forgiven for thinking these images are photographs of weather patterns, ocean floors or even some form of bacterial growth. But they are, infact, a composition of countless 3D spheres, cylinders and cubes that have been extruded and coloured to form a beautiful series of abstract 3D art.

Created by 3D artist Lee Griggs, the project began as an experiment with XGen, Maya's arbitrary primitive generator technology. Griggs comments on his website: "I basically use a texture map to drive the length and colour of an XGen primitive. These primitives can range from spheres, splines or as in most of the examples below, cube geometry that has been exported as an archive.

"I then use expressions with XGen in Maya to define the length of the archives. Finally, I use the Arnold software renderer to create the final image. Arnold is able to realistically render millions of these pieces of geometry very quickly at high resolutions without any problem."

Want to make your own abstract 3D art? You can find a tutorial detailing Griggs' process here.