EMAIL: pviojo@adinet.com.uy
NAME: Pablo Viojo
TOPIC: Fortress
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Time! (I)
COUNTRY: Uruguay
WEBPAGE: 
RENDERER USED: MegaPov 0.6a by Nathan Kopp
TOOLS USED: CorelDraw 10, Paint Shop Pro 6.0
RENDER TIME: 2 hours 54 minutes
HARDWARE USED: Pentium III - 550 MHz

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

First, when I read the topic for this round I though about a place a lost place in the middle of nowhere, a place like the far-west. But then I imagine what's the only thing you can't really get out of, and that is ... 

Yes, you've got it, that thing is time.

Although it seems so hard to get out or get in of some places it could always be done, for example: if you're lost in the Himalayas it could be hard, to get out but in the end you will always found a way out of it just because there's a way to escape. 

But with time no. You are always moving at its velocity and you can't go anywhere. Just sit down and wait.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

The hourglass was all made by CSG and all hand-coded. I took a model from a photograph and tried to make it the most real possible. The textures for it were taken from the standard POV-Ray libraries.

The sand in the hourglass was also hand-coded and made of CSG.

The grass was made by creating an object to represent the leaves which is only a difference between a sphere ( to get it curved ) and three planes. Then I created a macro to position the levaes making concentric circles around the main hourglass and very near from the camera to create the effect of density without needing too many objects (at the end it were about 15.000) and orient the leaves according to a couple of parameters (wind direction and strenght and % of randomness).

The camera position and aspect_ratio was choose to make it more cinematographic (just a try :) )

Finally CorelDraw was used to write the copyright and PSP for converting it to JPG.

This was my first approach to the topic.

(The sources are not included but if you send me an e-mail I'll send them to you) (There are many files and I couldn't find them now at my disks)