Given the topic 'science' I thought I would try and create something
other than some bleeding-edge widget. A bunch of sundials I saw at
one of those nature stores a few days ago gave me the idea to trace
a sundial.

The sundial is appropriate to the topic since it is the product of
man's attempt to quantify the passage of time.

The image is pretty simple. It's mostly a large cylinder with a flattened
cone as the gnomon and some simple scaled cubes as the numbers. The
numbers (except for XII) aren't really in the right location, but I
didn't think anyone would notice (or care). The ground is a height
field that was generated using an image whose source I've also included.

I originally tried to make the sundial a brass or bronze texture but
didn't have much success with that, so I used jade which seems to look
great on just about everything. I scaled the texture up a little because
its default scale made the numbers very hard to read.

POVRay took about 5 hours to trace the image on my 386DX40 with
anti-aliasing set at 0.05 and all the other switches at their defaults.
I used Moray to model the scene and then tweaked some of the objects
by hand.


Matt (m.loiselle@ieee.org)