EMAIL: micro@earthlink.net
NAME: Michael Bernstein
TOPIC: Time
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
RENDERER USED: winpov 3.0 beta 7
TOOLS USED: none
RENDER TIME: 25 hours 
HARDWARE USED: NexGen PF-100, 8 Mb RAM
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

This is an image of  a planet where the " sands of time " have run out - literally!

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

The Hourglass was created by rotating a wall segment built of cylinder and torus sections ( that were scaled to flatten the wall thickness ) around the Y axis.  since the top and bottom are identical, I just mirrored the segment vertically. the rotation was done using a while loop. 

The arches were made by combining two torii with 1 x 3 oval cross sections. The support is a torus. the hole in the middle ( where the hourglass is) was subtracted using a sphere slightly larger than the hourglass.  The texture was modified from the Grnt20 texture in Dennis Oliveir's POVLAB.inc file. I stretched it in the x and z directions and added some turbulence and normal perturbation.

The sky and clouds were modified from the Sky_Tex texture by Holger Bettog found in the Textur.inc file by Ralf Huels. I left the two gradient layers on the sky_sphere, but moved the cloud layer to an infinite plane overhead and rescaled it.

The sand inside the bottom of the hourglass is a simple cone.

The sand texture and hieghtmap used for the ground and sand inside the hourglass were taken from a source file I found on the internet but I no longer recall where.