EMAIL: rfo@fmsc.com.au
NAME: Robbie Fowler
TOPIC: Time
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
RENDERER USED: winpov 3.0beta
TOOLS USED: My brain, Texture Magic and a little bit of Terrain Maker
RENDER TIME: TBA
HARDWARE USED: Pentium-120

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

'The shrine to time'

The centre piece of my image is a fully operational sun dial. If you
move the light source across the sky the sun dial will tell you the time.
(Unfortunately a 250K MPEG is larger than allowed).


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

The steps and pedestal in the shrine are unions created with the new
procedual additions to povray 3. I spent a lot of time messing around with
their size and scale. Parameters drive the creation of the steps so
I can easily take them out of the scene and use them again.
The marble is mapped onto each step individually, including the little curve at the end,
so it does not look silly by joining as the stairs run down.
 
The step marble is one of the standard textures in Texture Magic, the only program
I use for most of my pictures. Texture Magic does nothing I can't do by hand, but it makes
messing around very interactive, well worth the small amount of money it costs. 

I added the urns with fire to show off the water. As the scene contains a
sun dial, I could not add more then one light source and it needs to be in the
correct place for the dial to work. The light generated by the emitting halos 
(new to povray3) did the trick.

The sun dial itself is another seperate module. All hand made with CSG and
parameters so other can use it easily. I had to use some maths to lay out
the letters (true type fonts, new in povray 3) 
on the inside properly. Thanks to povray having sine and cosine functions
this was not too much trouble. I union up the whole thing in the file and placed it
in the scene.

The grass from the mountain came from the textures on the povray cdrom.

Other notes:
I use the idef's a lot to place simple textures and colors in my scene during development.
This makes working with fancy textures quite interactive.

Initially I had the shrine set in a plane and was planning to add a garden around the
outside. Unfortunately time has run out for me, so I am setting the shrine in a 
height field created with Terrain Maker.
I only just got a copy as I finished this off so I don't think I am using it to its best.