This was all started by Matt Kruse, who decided, ages and ages ago (approximately 1994), that it would be nice to have a little competition.
Although that is what he tried to set up, he failed completely and instead got himself a great big competition, with many excellent entries each month from amateurs and professionals alike.
After running the competition very successfully for almost a year, and being more or less solely responsible for organising 20-30 entrants per month, Matt decided he could no longer find the time needed to handle the enormous workload.
Almost as soon as this happened, the folks on the usenet news group
comp.graphics.rendering.raytracing started talking about
how to get it going again. Things started to move when Chip Richards set
up a mailing list to discuss how best to re-start the competition. The
email came thick and fast, with contributions from Chris Cason, who runs
the povray.org site, and Matt himself, as well as many new people keen
to get things going again.
Now, after some hard work and much discussion, we have the competition back. The first new round was May-June 1996, and was a rousing success. This time it is being run by a team of three people with support from many others. We have automated as much as possible to allow us to make this thing really big.
The admin team spend a lot of time on the competition. The people who submit entries spend far, far, longer, creating superb artwork. Altogether this is an impressive event, one of the true instances of the Internet making things happen that would otherwise be impossible.
Now, instead of one overworked administrator, the IRTC is run by a team of overworked, but dedicated, ray tracing enthusiasts.
In October 1997, the IRTC expanded into two competitions--a continuation of the existing competition for still images, and a new competition for rendered animations. Every two months a new stills topic is announced; every three months, a new animation topic is revealed. People go away and create rendered still images or animations based on the topic. These are then submitted to us. We compile the submissions for viewing and voting. After the end of the voting period, some winners are chosen. When the polite applause dies down, the admin team post a new topic, and it all starts all over again.
Chris Cason has put the artwork submitted here onto a competition CD-ROM, which is now for sale. Future CD-ROMs are expected. In addition, our sponsors have agreed to provide prizes for the winners.
We want this thing to grow. There is no particular reason why this should not be the best public collection of 3D graphics anywhere on the net, if not anywhere at all. Certainly the admin team are expecting free tickets to SIGGRAPH! :-)