TITLE: The Sands Of Time
NAME: Tekno Frannansa
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: tek@evilsuperbrain.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.evilsuperbrain.com
TOPIC: Desert
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: hourglas.jpg
ZIPFILE: hourglas.zip
RENDERER USED: 


        POV-Ray for Windows v3.6


TOOLS USED: 


        POV-Ray editor
         Wings3D


RENDER TIME: 


         22h 16m 20s


HARDWARE USED: 


        Athlon XP 3000+ 2GB RAM



IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


A man, soon to die, alone and helpless in the desert.

The hourglass is symbolic of his life time, nearing it's end.

 

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


This was my first attempt at modelling a human being. I built the figure from
scratch in Wings3D, working on a low-poly model and using smoothing to get the
nice curved shape. I'm very pleased with how he turned out, though I'm sure I
will do better in future.

The man was textured in pov, using entirely procedural textures. The skin
texture is far more complex than was really necessary for this image, with
veins and a cracked sunburnt surface, but I think this subtlety was worth the
effort..

The radiosity & reflections in the scene show a desert environment under a blue
sky, even though we can only see blackness in the background. This effect was
acheived using a black plane with no_reflection, and by saving the radiosity
from a seperate render showing the entire desert this man is in.

I'm particularly pleased with the sand texture in this scene. It uses a noisy
normal matching a noisy pigment, with fairly high specular to get that nice
sheen. The falling sand is the same texture mapped onto a cylinder, with a
rather complicated trick to randomly make holes in the pattern so it looks like
lots of seperate grains.

I've provided the full source to this scene, so the other details can be found
in there.