Cosmic 8-ball

Okay, this random CG experiment evolved rather quickly. At first, I was just playing around with circular shapes, creating bubbles. Next, I started to make some rudimentary marbles. Then before I knew it, I had a concept image for a sort of black hole gateway to a digital Matrix-like world. But even that wasn't good enough, it was finally transformed into a cosmic 8-ball with the black hole at its core. Of course I blame the music I was listening to for that final edit :-P

Resource: Dark Wood Texture by *elemis
Tools used: Photoshop CS2 w/ optical mouse
Layers: 12
CG time: 41 minutes
Music fuel: Blue Man Group: X-FILES Theme [link]