EMAIL:bw@netbuggy.freeserve.co.uk
NAME:B. Wilkins
TOPIC:History
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE:History of Flight
COUNTRY:UK
WEBPAGE:
RENDERER USED:POVray 3.1
TOOLS USED:
RENDER TIME:5m 19s
HARDWARE USED:AMD K6-2 350MHz
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

Originally I was going to have four pocket watches, each representing a specific
 age e.g. bronze age,stone age,etc, but after creating the watches, that idea 
didn't seem right. I left it for a while and then with just under a month to go 
hit upon the idea of keeping the watches, but putting events from History as 
each face.

Hence, the History of Flight.
1. A kite - the early dream of flight.
2. Montgolfier brothers balloon.
3. The Wright brothers flyer.
4. The E28/29 - G.40 or 'Squirt' the first British jet.

Someone then suggested I put the whole thing in a 'time tunnel' to finish it off.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

1. Kite
A simple box constructed from cylinders of wood. A couple of superellipsoids to 
act as 'skin' for the boxes, each is slightly transparent to get a thin paper 
effect. The streamers are a series of cylinders which follow a sine wave path.

2. Ballon
A couple of blobs to get the overall balloon shape, then an image map to get the 
balloon pattern (which I got from an original image of the balloon) and finally a 
set of cylinders and spheres for each of the brothers.

3. Flyer
Each wing is a very flat superellipsoid, then its just a case of lots of wooden 
cylinders for the struts and black cylinders for the cross-wires. Virtually 
everything is either a box or cylinder, the hard part was positioning everthing, 
especially since the front is at an angle, whereas the back is parallel to the 
ground, but, the back tapers inwards which just adds to the fun !! I made a fair 
bit of use of the 'vrotate' function which was extremely useful. After that, just 
stick in a few birds (which were actually an after thought) and that's it.

4. G.40
This was a tough one. Most of the shapes in this are made up from lathes of the cubic 
spline type to get the smooth curves. Any shapes that aren't lathes are spheres. It 
just took along time to get the correct shapes,especially since all this was coded 
by hand !!

Overall.
Most of the textures are standard, except the camouflage texture.
The sky spheres are all from the include files.
The 'time tunnel' is just a hollow cylinder width a cloud texture mapped onto it and 
scaled a large amount in the z axis.
Since I didn't give myself much time to work, the contents of each individual scene are 
pretty cheap, luckily,they can afford to be since in the final image the appear 
relatively small, therefore a large amount of detail is not necessary. Still if you 
render them individually you should see a fair amount of detail,especially in the flyer.