Full making-of story is here: postspectacular.com/process/20080702_printmagcover

This is an early sketch for the cover design of the August 2008 issue of Print Magazine, a 3d printed sculpture generated using the Gray-Scott reaction diffusion model. The final sculpture displays (and purely consists of) its entire creation process. 2D Frames of the animation are stacked along the 3rd dimension and form a 3d density volume which can then be turned into a proper mesh using the same algorithm used for visualizing MRI scans (Marching cubes). The sculpture consisted of initially 5.23M triangles which I needed to reduce to 1.9M polygons for reasons of extreme fragility. Also please check the magazine website and related flickr set:

printmag.com/design_articles/building_the_cover/tabid/388/Default.aspx
flickr.com/photos/toxi/sets/72157604724789091/