That Roger had to ask tells me I did a decent job on this image. Not perfect, but it's a work in progress. This was the first time I did a full scale render. There is still much room for improvement. I've been dabbling with this scene on & off for a few years.

The type of program is a ray-tracer. It simulates light rays through the scene and is capable of following the laws of physics. That's why it took so long. You might say I had the 'realism' settings turned up all the way. Glass like objects are extremely computationally time consuming. All that reflection and refraction, as well as a few other niceties such as slight focal blurring, and something called radiosity.

This program, POVRay, is quite literally a programming language. There are no wire frame models or click&drag drawing. You describe a scene with a language not dissimilar to C, Pascal, and Basic.

This rendering took about a quadrillian calculations for just over 5.3 billion light rays, and took 38 hours, 32 minutes, 57 seconds to render on a Core2 quad at 3GHz.

If you're interested to at least take a look at the program website and check out the "hall of fame" gallery you can see what some REAL artists can do.

http://www.povray.org/

Brian