EMAIL: delfeld@uwplatt.edu
NAME: Neal Delfeld
TOPIC: time
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
RENDERER USED: Povray 3.7b
TOOLS USED: Fontlab 2.5, rods.exe(included)
RENDER TIME: A whole shitload.  Maybe 12 hours.
HARDWARE USED: Pentium 90, 16mb ram
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Choas and time.  This is rather representational.  A well ordered sphere floating 
inside a different universe, where threads of time are well-ordered, but by 
much different conventions.  I selected this pattern of rods out of others because 
of the imposition of the chaos into the sphere.  This seems like what happened 
in the last 100 years or so to time theory.

I like the spiral into the clock hands, which continues the spiral.  I also like the 
effect of the rods bent and half-reflected in the glass.  

Overall, however, I don't find the randomness to be aesthetically pleasing.  It's 
difficult to find beauty in chaos (true chaos, not mathematical) because I believe we
have a tendency to attempt to find order of some sort in it.  Even Pollock got tired 
of paint-on-canvas painting, and started to add personally-directed lines to his later 
works.  This need for knowing order has its effects on an image as well.  That doesn't
limit a work to a specific method, even though there seems to be universal rules that 
work (rule of thirds, cutting off the corners, etc.), but it does mean that an order 
should be established in some way and followed through.  Of course, I don't think a 
completely symetrical work is anything better than chaos, or that something mathemati-
cally sound offers any hope or joy... just look at all the crap produced by Povray, 
which relies on mathematical purity.
	As far as it goes, I don't think this image is the best one that can exist, 
even if it wins the competition.  It is substantially lacking somewhere, and I 
haven't figured out where that is yet.  It seems the background is too sudden, or too 
2-d.  Maybe it's that all parts of it are perfect (rods, spheres, cones, even 
the six), maybe it's that there is no real significant explanation of what time might 
be or can be, maybe it's that there aren't enough rods to create the choas I wanted.
I suspect an image-mapped background of an infinity of rods might be more of what's 
needed, but I don't have the time to do another picture.  

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

Random rods made with a program I wrote, which is included in the .zip file.  The 
actual rod file I ended up using is rods.pov.
Glass sphere with insides removed.
Self-made "6" (actaully "a" in test.ttf) made with a friends copy of Fontlab 2.5.
Three cones, showing an actual time.  See the time_2.pov file.
I compiled it in Povray as a .tga file, then transferred it into .jpg using Graphic 
Workshop, the shareware version. 
Also included is the .ini file used.