TITLE: Cathedral
NAME: Bob Franke
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: bobfranke@halcyon.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.halcyon.com/wordsltd/pov/pov.htm
TOPIC: Great Engineering Achievements
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: cathedrl.jpg
ZIPFILE: cathedrl.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.02

TOOLS USED: 
    POV editor, PhotoStyler, Keith Rule's Wcvt2pov, Poser,
personal photos of cathedrals and The book...
Cathedral - The Story of Its Construction by David Macaulay

RENDER TIME: 
    12 hours 7 minutes (anti-aliasing at 0.2)

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium-133 48MB


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

The engineering, construction and craftsmanship of the medieval gothic
cathedrals is amazing.  The construction of these great structures often
consumed all the resources of the local people for 15 to 50 years.  Some
took as long as 200 years to complete.  Often the people attending the
first services were the grandchildren of those who laid the foundation.

A notable engineering achievement of cathedral design was the innovation
of the flying buttress.  This allowed the main piers to be quite thin in
proportion to their height, allowing more space for the very large windows.

In my cathedral, we are standing near the south center of the building,
looking west, down the nave, to the front door.  The scale is realistic.
The nave is 60 feet wide and it's 150 feet to the center of vaulted ceiling.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

The scene has over 21000 objects, about 6000 are for the Poser man. I used
patches for the banners and vaulted ceiling.  The image maps for the banners
were done with Photostyler. The rest is made with lots of boxes and cylinders
with a few tori and spheres.

The construction is completely closed with most of the light coming through
the windows.  Although originally lighted with sunlight and candles, I have
added some modern electric lighting.  The walls on each side of the are
120 feet tall with large windows in the upper half. Thirty feet to each side
of the nave there are 65 foot tall walls, again with large windows.

The Poser man, aparrently a tourist posing for a picture, was added to better
show off the grand scale of the building.  Wcvt2pov was used to convert the
Poser file to POV.  To save space, it is not included.

Well, that's about it... hope you like it,
Bob


