11.2.4  The IRTC CDROM (Year One)

The IRTC CDROM (Year One) is a compilation of all entries made to the Internet Raytracing Competition during its first year of operation. As the IRTC is bi-monthly, this covers round #1 (May/June 1996) to round #6 (March/April 1997). There are over 1000 images and 500 source archives available.

Back Cover of The IRTC CDROM, Year One

This CDROM is designed to be used with a web browser - the entire CD is indexed via HTML and bears some resemblance to the IRTC website (with enhancements).

Almost all the submissions are 800x600 pixel JPEG's, and all have a text file accompanying them giving author's details and an explanation of the image. In some cases, that explanation is quite comprehensive. (That means that this CD is a great learning tool for POV-Ray users!) Additionally, many authors chose to provide the source to their images, in the form of data files for whatever renderer that they used. In most cases, the renderer of choice was POV-Ray, and thus there is a large collection of POV-Ray scene files on the CD, most for version 3.0 of that raytracer.

On the CD you will find all of the submission images, author's text files, and scene files available for the 96/97 year. In addition, the judges comments are available and have been linked to each submission's entry in that round's HTML page. Also included are the tabulated voting scores and results pages.

By popular demand, an effort was made to include the submissions from the predecessor of the IRTC. This competition was monthly and ran from November 1994 to December 1995. Due to the length of time that has passed, it was not possible to contact all of the authors for their permission to include their work, and as such only about half of the submissions are on the CD. This still adds up to over 150 raytracings, many of them stunning work by some of the same authors whose work you will find in the IRTC.

Also by popular demand, the CD contains the full set of official binaries for the freeware Persistence of Vision raytracer, version 3.02. This includes documentation and sample scenes as well as the program for the DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows 95/NT, Macintosh, x86 Linux, SunOS and Amiga platforms.

As a special bonus, the CD contains an AVI version of Thomas Schmidt and Rene' Schwietzke's excellent 'museum' raytraced animation. This AVI is 65 megabytes in size ! Also present are the high, medium, and low-bandwidth MPEG versions of this same animation. This AVI is not simply a conversion from the MPEG - it was put together by the authors from the original TGA files, especially for this CDROM.

Finally, there are high-quality versions of many of the scenes that won or achieved technical merit status in the competition. At the very least, these will be high-quality JPEG's, but in many cases they are in lossless TGA format. In addition, there are a number of these images in higher resolution than originally submitted, including a number in 1280x1024. Some of the winning authors have submitted bio's giving a little information about themselves.

The CD is ISO9660 compatible with short (MS-DOS) file names. It is a hybrid ISO/HFS disk meaning that Macintosh users can be happy ; the Mac side of things is fully laid-out for ease of use. On both Windows 95/NT and the Macintosh, if you have a web browser properly installed on your system, the disk will auto-start when it is inserted into your drive, loading the base index.htm file into the browser.

The disk, in total, contains over 550 megabytes of data. It was produced to help support the running costs of the POVRAY.ORG and IRTC.ORG websites.

See »http://www.aussie.org/products/ for more information and to order from our secure server.