EMAIL: shermo@sb.grci.com
NAME: Nathan Ostrowsky
TOPIC: Time
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: "The End of Time"
RENDERER USED: winpov 3.0b
TOOLS USED: terrain maker, moray, improcess, lparser, wcvt2pov
RENDER TIME: 13 hours 4 minutes 48 seconds
HARDWARE USED: computer(486-66MHz)
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A relic of a now dead empire stands towering over a lake
and nearby hills. The hourglass has been shattered, and the time-sand has
run out like dun blood. How was it shattered? Perhaps by some accident, a
storm wind, a fight between great beasts? Or perhaps it was done by an enemy
of the empire, although it must have been a last desparate move, for they
surely doomed themselves, as well, by their action. However it was, there is
no longer any time for human empires. It has all run out. The time now belongs
to the Trees. Maybe their empire will be a better one.

    Oooh! That was more literary than I thought it would be!
I figured everyone would be doing things like clocks and watches so I figured
I'd be different and do an hourglass. I wanted the setting to be interesting,
too; the old table in a room just wouldn't do. I've been thinking about doing
some surrealism with ray-tracing. The medium could make more of an impact
because of its photorealism than paint could. So I came up with the huge
hourglass.

HOW IT WAS CREATED: The terrain was designed with Terrain Maker. The trees are
from tree04.ls, an l-system file that comes with L.J. Lapre's Lparser, with
one alteration: I doubled the size of the leaves so the trees would look so
transparent. The cow is from a model I got from the Avalon server of 
  	*******	(c) Copyright 1995 Viewpoint Datalabs Intl. *******
I ran it through wcvt2pov to make it into a pov-ray .inc file.
    The hourglass is, of course the most complicated object. The ends are CSGs
of cylinders and tori. The glass itself is an intersection of two surfaces of
revolution, the inner one inverse. If I had just done a single SOR, it would
have been a solid piece of glass and wouldn't have refracted right. The hole
is complex all by itself. I drew the b/w gif with improcess using the
following method:  Pick the center point and draw lines of random length and
direction radiating from it to make the star pattern of impact. Next draw
random connecting lines at random angles between the star lines and flood fill
the resulting triangles. This simulates the shards of glass the offending
object takes with it as it goes through.   I used this for a height field and
ran into another problem: the inside of a height field is defined as its
underside, so when I CSG subtracted it from the Glass it put a square hole
through the opposite side. I solved this by making the hole a finite object by
intersecting it with a plane.  Finally, the sand. The inside sand was an
intersection of a cylinder and an ellipsoid. The pile outside and the bit on
the rim I modeled with Mony the Modeler (Moray).  Well, that's about it.