The cover is an artistic rendering of signalling reporter islands of four fluorescent reporters (magenta, yellow, cyan, and green) lighting up a neuron.
I imported neuron morphology data from neuromorpho.org into ZBrush and used this as a base for my model. After cleaning the model and adding some texture to it, I used hair fibres to create spines, and tried to give these some variation in length and shape.
I then imported this into Blender, and added a nucleus to the model. Shader nodes were used to create a material for the neuron that was semi-transparent but that also looked three-dimensional and was visible in the render. Geometry nodes were used to create the fluorescent reporters by randomly distributing points inside the model and instancing these using a simple sphere shape. To randomize colour I used the random output from an object node plugged into a colour ramp set to constant with four set colours and plugged this into the base colour and emission.
After rendering this out, the image was adjusted in Photoshop, before text was added to create the mock front cover.
