EMAIL: 71524.2020@compuserve.com
NAME: Thomas J. Hruska
TOPIC: TIME
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray v3.0 public beta test 7a for Win32s and Win95
TOOLS USED: Quick Pov v0.1, Image View
RENDER TIME: 3 hours
HARDWARE USED: 486DX2/66 8MB
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

     TimeWarp is a nifty graphic that I spent 10-15 hours making by hand.
This image was made and created on the dates of June 13-14, 1996.  I
personally like the way the camera is positioned on a clock, this effect adds
more realism to the comet, collapsed cube, purple fog, and spiraled tube.
Use this graphic as a Windows background picture or just store it on your
hard drive as long as you don't claim that you made this.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

     Before I began the whole project, I read the 15,000 lines of text the
people who make POV-Ray made...that took 2 1/4 days to complete.  Then I
wrote the code to Quick Pov v0.1, taking only three more days to complete.
Then I began the major project of meeting the requirements of the POV-Ray
contest which I will describe how I went about doing so...
     
     When I began, I used Quick Pov to put my project together in the order
of the objects that I wanted, light sources, mesh, surface of revolution,
etc.  I later changed these things by hand directly from povray's own editer.

     I first tried to make the camera be inside of a surface of revolution
object, but I realized that it took too long to render so I got rid of that,
but this is how I got my 4 point lights in the order they are in.  Next, I
took a large sphere and made it have the texture starfield and positioned it
at the origin.  Then I added another sphere and made it have a wood texture
which looked like a planet.  Next I moved the camera and then decided that
the title 'Time and the Final Frontier' didn't sound like a good idea anymore
so I stuck in a spiraled cylinder and added purple fog around my camera and
then asked some friends if it looked good, they said make the sphere have a
tail and make the cylinder longer.  So, I experimented until I found the
perfect shades for the spheres to make the perfect comet.  Then I pushed
myself to the limit and added a mesh of 24 triangles to make a collapsed
cube.  After that I still had a feeling I was missing something, then I had
the idea of adding the clock.  I took everything out of my POV file except
the cylinder (clock face) and the COUR.TTF numbers I was working with.  I
spent about 1 hour getting the numbers aligned properly.  After that all I
had to do was make the final rendering at Quality=10, the 800x600 pixel image
took 3 long hours to render.  Then I used Compuserve's Image View program
for translating images from one format to another, I edited the JPEG
compression options so that the Quality=75 and Smooth=49, the image was
smoothed out some from the original so that it didn't suffer any degradation
during the convert process.

FINAL NOTES:

     Quick Pov v0.1 is a program that I wrote so that I wouldn't need to
look up the "How-To's" in the POV-Ray help file.  This file is available on
my web site at:
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Serpent_Eye_Software

     I am a computer programmer and artist.  A lot of the graphics you see
on my web site are made only with POV-Ray.  These images are easy to make
with Quick Pov v0.1, I encourage you to download the software and edit my
own programming if you wish, just leave the EXE and PCX files alone, those
are owned by Serpent Eye Software and myself, thanks.