TITLE: Time Flies...
NAME: Peter Jones
COUNTRY: Australia
EMAIL: pjones@powerup.com.au
TOPIC: Flight
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: pj-time.jpg
ZIPFILE: pj-time.zip
RENDERER USED: Povray 3.0 for Windows
TOOLS USED: Paintshop Pro 4.10 for file conversion
RENDER TIME: Approx. 2 hours - I went to bed rather than wait around for it...
HARDWARE USED: Pentium P133

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Time Flies...
I want to say, first of all, that this image was created in the three
days after I first downloaded Povray 3.0 (and discovered that a
competition existed.)  Almost as soon as I discovered the topic of the
competition - flight - the idea of flying time demanded that I create
this image.  Along the way I produced a few intermediate images - and
although I have a preference for one other than my submission, it
doesn't really show "Time Flying" as well as this one does.

Then, of course, I discovered that "Time" had been an earlier
competition topic, so I basically stopped work on this to develop my
second submission.  However, if lateral thought is worth points, this
picture may be worth something yet :-)

The image itself, of course, shows "Time", represented by an infinite
series of flying alarm clocks (Made in Korea, no doubt) drifting
inexorably through the unreal grid of the Space-Time continuum.  The
current time (12:00) has just broken through the shimmering veil of time
- and another waits ten minutes behind it.  In the wings, so to speak.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

As stated above, this image represents my first *real* play with PovRay,
so the scene itself is rather simple.  The clock itself is made up of a
couple of cylinders (Glossy Red and Aluminum) with Gold and Aluminum
torii front and back.  The face is just a gif texture map.  The glass
cover is convex.  Each of the hands (hour, minute, second) was modelled
individually so that each clock in the series could show a different
time - and then the Gold second hand became virtually invisible anyway
(even in another "closeup" shot!)

The wings are essentially a couple of cylinders with a whole load of
straight-razor-like feathers.  They could have done with a lot more
work, but as of yet I'm not using an external modeller and I preferred
to devote more time to my next image...  The "Continuum" is just a
series of thin Gold cylinders, and the cloud texture beyond is, I'm sad
to say, lifted straight from the PovRay HELP file.  I just haven't had
the opportunity to fiddle with that sort of texture definition yet.
Next time, though...  :-)

Oh, and there are perhaps a dozen clocks in the scene - there is at
least one at each end of the row which is "off-screen", and this was
done mainly to provide any additional reflections or shadows that might
otherwise be missing...

The image was rendered with an anti-alias factor of 0.3