EMAIL:gerritvn@osi.co.za
NAME:Danie van Niekerk
TOPIC: Time
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
RENDERER USED: Polyray v.1.8
TOOLS USED:
  "SWEEP" for wormhole's basic structure
  CSD for colours,various text-editors for the input file,
  My own text-to-blob utility written in Pascal

RENDER TIME: 90 Minutes (In total) 
HARDWARE USED: Pentium 100 Mhz with Mathco and SVGA,standard mouse & keyboard
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

 Time-and the relativity of it,as shown by an imaginary picture of a
 "wormhole" (or black hole). The space-time-lines are distorted around it,
 and time is "drawn out" at the event horison.Although the "time" is
 identical everywhere,the perception of it, at different points,is relative to your
 viewpoint-the effects of this distortion has an outward rippling effect on the
 surrounding space.<Rather surrealistic> 


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

 I constructed a clock using discs,cones and a torus of transparent
 coloured glass.The numerals on the watch were constructed by a very
 simple utility I wrote in Pascal,which converts text to blob-components.
 The face of the clock was made using a noise_surface with a ripple-normal,
 as well as a colour-map.(The colours of which I made using CSD).The original
 idea for the ripple came from the classic "blue_ripple."The clock's
 background was intersected by a grouping of cylinders,giving the illusion
 of parallel white lines,placed so that it fits the camera view around the
 edges of the tiled image,for a "seamless" fit.

 The landscape around the hole was made by first generating an image of
 which the colouring was determined by a cyclic function.This was used as a   heightmap,with the clock-image(already rendered)wrapped around it,using a planar  imagemap.

 The "hole" itself was generated by a simple utility,called "sweep".In the
 program,a set of 2-d points are inputted by mouse,and a lathe-format is
 generated.I changed some of the hole's points manually,and united it
 with the landscape.The whole was coloured using the image of the traced
 clock, a shiny surface and four lights.


ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

 Anyone wiht + and - comments & suggestions,or who wants to look at
 the code,or who is also interested in Polyray code generation utilities can
 contact me at gerritvn@osi.co.za

 Danie van Niekerk