EMAIL:no13@ozemail.com.au
NAME:Nathan O'Brien
TOPIC:Greate Engineering Achievements.
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE:Redemption
COUNTRY:Australia
WEBPAGE:http://www.ozemail.com.au/~no13
RENDERER USED:Povray for Windows
TOOLS USED: Paintshop Pro, Autocad, Corel Trace
RENDER TIME:7 days
HARDWARE USED:Pentium II with 64Mb ram, Nt4 OS (2 machines)
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

The interior of the Hagia Sophia. The Hagia Sophia was the largest church in the world for 900
years and the greatest of the Byzantine domed buildings. One of the major engineering features of
the building, apart from the huge dome, was the integration of architectural aesthetics with 
structural necessity. For example the ring of windows along the base of the centre dome not only 
gives the dome an appearance of lightness but are also a means of preventing meridional cracking.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

The model was based on a gif image of the floor plan and a section. They were vectorized using Corel
Trace and then imported into Autocad. The Autocad drawing was very rough. It was used as a guide
only. All the modelling was done by hand. 

The interior was first modelled very simply with no texture or pigment definitions. The model was
then refined in several stages with each stage adding more detail. Texture maps were used where
possible to avoid unnecessary modelling. As can be seen by the zip file the model itself is very 
small.

The major difficulty in creating the model was time. Due to other commitments I was unable to do
any work on it during January. As a result I had to stop working on the model in order to render it
on time. As it was I used 2 Pentium II computers and used Paint Shop Pro to combine the two sections
of the image.

Stuff that I know still needs work.
The hanging lamps need work. They are hanging from rods instead of chains. I also want to experiment
with the no_shadow options to remove the anoying lamp shadows. The atmospheric effect also needs
more fine tuning. There are some elemnts on the floor that I did not have time to model. The location
, intensity, colour, and diminuation of the 2 primary light sources also needs some adjustment.