EMAIL: jerryl@n-jcenter.com
NAME:  Jerry Lyles
TOPIC: Time
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
RENDERER USED: CrystalGraphics 3-D Designer 2.0 (DOS)
TOOLS USED: Video capture and Photo paint 5+
RENDER TIME: About five minutes total
HARDWARE USED: Hyundai with 486DX4 100 Mhz 8Meg, VLB video
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 640x480 24bit Jpeg. The title Ourglass, represents not
the sands of time, but our Earth (and other earths,) slipping through the
glass of time.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
  First, a star image was selected as the background and
  a sphere representing Earth modeled against it. This sphere was texture
  mapped with a 3-D cloud procedural and placed at the center of a larger
  sphere which was mapped with a Glow procedural for the atmospheric glow
  around the Earth. This scene was modeled in two minutes 38 seconds and
  saved as a TGA image file.
  Next, a large circle was extruded and duplicated to create the top and
  bottom of the hourglass. A lathed polygon was used for the posts and
  a freehand polygon was lathed for the glass and set for transparancy. The
  wood texture was tiled from a small video capture of a wooden door.
  The first TGA image was used as the background for the hourglass and even
  though it took a couple of hours to figure out, the total rendering time
  was only about five minutes. The star image is from the CrystalGarphics
  CD-Rom that is available to users of 3-D Designer.
  PhotoPaint 5+ was used only to tweak the brightness and contrast as per the
  rules.