Well, if you all wanted to know how those uber-r33t graphics artists did their piping in their artwork, this is place to learn how. You will need the following: Adobe Photoshop 4.0.1, Eye Candy 3.0, and I recommend Illustrator 7.0 for the more complex pipes. (Word of warning: DO NOT WAREZ ANYTHING! BUY IT!)

Okay, we're going to start off with a 350 x 350 RGB image with a white background.

Next, what you do is get the paintbrush tool, and on top of a new layer, you draw a THICK line (this is for a pipe) and make this line as smooth as possible (use a Wacom pad if needed). Other methods include creating pipes using the Paths tool, and the best method, which is import from Illustrator. I have already created a little thing with Illustrator, for the purpose of this tutorial

Let's just say, for the sake of argument, that there is a pipe between a box and a funky aluminum ball. Okay, the pipe is in its own layer, and the ball and box is in its own as well. Select the pipe layer by holding down CTRL, and click on the layer where the pipe is in. It should select the pipe. Okay, what we want to do now is add depth to the pipe. We can accomplish this by firing up Eye Candy 3.0's Cutout filter.

You want to use the settings that are shown above in there. Basically, the premise of it is that you specify a direction that suggests the light source is in the upper left, and use a short distance with plenty of blur. This is the result -->

It does look crappy, because I didn't feel like doing anything much more with it. :) After you do this, try using the airbrush and various colors to add realism to it, such as rust and whatnot, and also try using the Drop Shadow filter to add more depth to the picture. You can also add high-lights to the pipe using an airbrush with a little opacity and the fade to 10 steps thing on.

With this little thing, you can do something like this -->