EMAIL: shogun@compsoc.cs.latrobe.edu.au
NAME: Alexander Cohen
TOPIC: Time 
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
RENDERER USED: POV 2.2
TOOLS USED: Just a DOS's text editor
RENDER TIME: Overnite ... probably about 10 hours
HARDWARE USED: 486DX2/80vlb

IMAGE TITLE: Time And The Stars

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: In the far reaches of time and space a doomed hourglass
begins its infinite plunge into a black hole, against a background of
cosmic strings from the begining of time and the faint glow of contempory 
starlight.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
Theres nothing really special about the objects in this, its all basic
spheres/boxes/planes except for the hourglass's glass and sand. The glass
is a pair of parabolic quartics clipped at the base of the hourglass, using
one of the glass textures 'from the box'. The sand is the most complex object 
in the scene, its a box clipped by a height_field (plasma field gif) and the
parabolic quartics, with the cap made of the same height field that clipped 
it. The texture on the sand is simply cork scaled down to 0.1 or so. The
super-string texture I 'discovered' by accident, I was experimenting with
a nebula to go in front of the stars and decided it looked looked to stringy 
and brilliant for a nebula but kept it, feeling the super-strings fitted in 
with the theme of time perfectly. The stars are not an image mapped gif, but
a highly turbulent texture with very little white and a lot of black.

Currently i'm in the middle of exams, There is a lot more I would have liked 
to do with this scene such as spatial distortion around the black hole and 
everything needs better textures..