The Rhea Core
The Rhea Program, good-enough-for-Rock-&-Roll. In the comic I'll likely still touch it up a little.
Line Art—the earliest pass.
Clown Pass, for controlling my selections. This is beneath the final but doesn't show in the render.
"Overpass", with mild adjustments made over the clown pass for the sake of the final.
Multiply gets good shadows in, but is very sensitive to the following highlight layers.
Subsurface scattering at thinner points; I had to hue-shift it a few times to find something that really worked for me.
Pass with specular and some of the liquid highlights.
I've decided to combine the biomechanical thing with a classic ship's core; I give you the Rhea Program. (I chose the name to correspond to Argos, both of whom were children of Gaia which is strangely fitting.) The idea is that it is an evolving, sentient machine containing, and maintaining, a singularity; for use building a wormhole at its final destination. Add a few tens of thousands of years onto that, of learning and evolving, and you get this; a being of incredible intelligence, bifurcated personality, and virtual omnipresence, centered at a few spires distributed throughout the colony ship. You've effectively got a god, or a sort of Wyrd Sisters entity.
Inspiration came from a lot of human anatomy (masculine and feminine), and a few interesting-looking trees. Cables meet roots meet veins, oily swamp surface, lit from below... I like how it's coming out.