(Go straight to the secure order page)

   The IRTC CDROM (Year Three) is a compilation of all entries made to the Internet Raytracing Competition during its third year of operation. As the IRTC is bi-monthly, this covers round #13 (May/June 1998) to round #17 (March/April 1999). There are over 700 images and source archives available.

   In addition to the entire year's worth of stills submissions, the CD also contains four quarterly animation competition rounds (Aug 1998-Jul 1999).

You can see what the Year Three CD looks like - and even use it - by going to the IRTC CD3 Preview Page which has an online version of the CDROM.

   Persons familiar with the previous two IRTC CD's may be interested to know that this year's CD is radically different from the previous ones.

   Firstly, it has a stills index that covers every entry ever made into the IRTC from its inception in 1996 to the cut-off date of this CD. In this stills index, all thumbnails are held on the CD itself, with links being made to the image or source files either on the CD or on the IRTC website, depending on the date of the entry. (Entries made prior to May/June 1998 are on the IRTC website, the others are on the CD, along with all winning entries from any stills round, no matter what the date).

   Secondly, it has an entrants index that lists every competitor who has ever entered into the IRTC stills competition. This index is available in three forms ; sorted alphabetically, sorted by best score, and sorted by average score. Each entrant has their own HTML page which lists each of their entries sorted by date, by best overall score, by best technical, best artistic, and best concept/theme score.

   Thirdly, each stills round has an improved viewing page that incorporates, with each entry, its submission text file and the judges comments. When viewing the entries in each round, you can sort them alphabetically, or by overall, artistic, technical, or concept/theme score. These viewing pages and indexes are present for all stills rounds, not just the ones held on this CD. Where the HTML page refers to a image that is not on the CDROM, it is fetched from the IRTC website (this assumes that you are connected to the internet at the time).

   Almost all the stills 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. 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 v3.1, and thus there is a large collection of POV-Ray 3.1 scene files on the CD.

   The CD also contains a set of official binaries for version 3.1g of the freeware Persistence of Vision raytracer (this is the current version).

   As a special bonus, the CD contains a new version of the winning 'Creaturz' animation from the 'Creatures' animation round. This 33 megabyte AVI file is in 768x576-pixel resolution and was re-rendered specially for this CD.

   The CD is ISO-9660 compatible with short (8.3) file names. It should work on any operating system that is capable of both reading a CDROM and hosting a web browser. On Windows 95/98/NT and 2000, if you have a web browser properly installed on your system, the disk will auto-start when it is inserted into your drive.

   Unix users please note: your CD filesystem needs to be able to map the files on the CD to lower-case. With Linux, this is simple (see the check=relaxed option to mount(8) for more details).

   The disk, in total, contains over 650 megabytes of data and is well worth the US$29.00 asking price. This CD is being produced to help support the administration and running costs of the POVRAY.ORG and IRTC.ORG websites.