EMAIL: svalstad@sn.no
NAME: Stig M. Valstad
TOPIC: Time
TITLE: Two Minutes to Midnight
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
RENDERER USED: Polyray v 1.8
TOOLS USED: 
	Editors: Q v 3.0 for DOS and Joe v 2.2 for Linux
	Heightfield manipulation: HF-lab
RENDER TIME: Main image: 9m4s, top closeup: 3m5s, bottom closeup:  5m18s
HARDWARE USED: Cyrix 6x86 100 Mhz, 32 MB RAM
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

A sinister clock. The pendulum is an executioner's axe, the weights are
guillotins, the adornment at the top of the clock is a hangmans noose, etc.
This picture is rather dark, and is best viewed at night.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

I started with the pendulum, wich was a little tricky with all its curves.
The pendulum is of course inspired by Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum. It's
still basic CSG though, like everything in the scene except for the walls,
the leaves of the plant, and the blade of the scythe. I generally finalize
each sub-part of the scene in its own scene file before i put it into the
main scene file. That way I can make frequent test renderings without the
process taking too long time.

The stones in the walls is a 256x256 heightfield made with HF-lab.
The commands used to make the heightfield are:
   gf 256
   norm 0.7 1
   zedge 0.7 0.5

The leaves of the plant is a simple height-function, and the blade of the
scythe is made of two bezier patches. The scythe turned out to be easier to
make than I thought before I started to make it.

Just when I had finished my exams and was ready to really start working on
my entry for the competition, the CPU-fan caught fire. Irritating when
things like that happens, isn't it? I could still work on small things, but
any heavy CPU-use for more than a few minutes, and the CPU overheats. Oh,
well, it was a good excuse to upgrade the CPU