For this picture I used the perspective feature. For those that don’t already know, if you select “persp” under the draw menu and set the distortion slider to zero also under the draw menu, you can get perspective with the vanishing point in the center (Note: this has to be set for each new tool you select). I then placed the basic shapes using a purple glow material and used a marker for each one. Then on a separate layer, I used the same shapes, but inflated using an alpha map to mask it. I then inverted the points on the tools that were masked and selected “hide points”.
The alpha maps were created with pov-ray using a script which made use of the rand function. If I had ZBrush 1.23, I probably could have made the alpha maps in ZBrush in short order. I did it that way, since the textures would have been far too tedious otherwise.
Anyway, here’s the picture. I was also a little “creative” with the color scheme since anyone who’s familiar with Star Trek, knows that Borg ships glow green and not purple. 
