Salad: Giger's Alien in Vegetable Form

Till Nowak has worked as a freelance media artist since 1999 in his own studio in Mainz, Germany. He has created a 3D digital model of H.R. Giger's Alien, using digital models of vegetables. Note, it's not physically created with vegetables, but by using photographs of vegetables for the texturing process.

From a .PDF file on the artist's website:

MODELLING

Till Nowak modelled twelve digital vegetables in 3ds Max using classical polygon modelling techniques. Photographs of fresh vegetables were used for the texturing process. Most of the vegetables started with a cylinder primitive and needed around 30 minutes of work. The modelling was easy – it was much more difficult to find the right places and orientations to build a monster with it.

RENDERING

The final image was done by rendering several passes, such as diffuse, specular and ambient occlusion using 3ds Max Scanline renderer and Mental ray. The rendering was done in a few minutes thanks to my lowtech-lighting-methods.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the vegetable garden, right?