TITLE: Non nobis sed Tibi Domine NAME: Maurizio Tomasi COUNTRY: Italy EMAIL: zio_tom78@hotmail.com WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/zio_tom78 TOPIC: Architecture COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: mtdomine.jpg ZIPFILE: mtdomine.zip RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.5 for Windows TOOLS USED: - Paint Shop Pro 7.0 (height field creation, title, JPEG conversion) - sPatch 1.5 (the two statues) RENDER TIME: Statistics for mtdomine.pov, Resolution 768 x 768 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Time For Parse: 0 hours 0 minutes 56.0 seconds (56 seconds) Time For Trace: 2 hours 8 minutes 49.0 seconds (7648 seconds) Total Time: 2 hours 8 minutes 24.0 seconds (7704 seconds) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- HARDWARE USED: AMD Athlon 1000 Mhz with 128 MB RAM. IMAGE DESCRIPTION: This is a view of the Duomo of Milan (Italy), the biggest gothic church in the World. It was built over an ancient church (early Middle Ages; about V century, I think) whose ruins are still visible in the cellars of the Duomo. The image shows the top of the apse; the camera is placed about 60 meters above the ground (as a reference, the dome is about 110 meters high). The ladder on the top left was added in the XX century to let the visitors to reach the roof of the Duomo and admire the landscape. The title I chose for the image, "Non nobis sed Tibi Domine" ("it is not for us but for You, God"), was an expression used in the Middle Ages during the consacration of new churches and cathedrals. People in the Middle Ages had a strong piety, and these giant buildings, where almost every architectonic element and decoration points towards the Sky, were without doubt an act of true and deep devotion (I've read that merchants dragged carts full of heavy stones to the Chatedral of Chartres like horses, and after their arrival they praised a monk to flog them in order to make amends for their sins). It was this extraordinary religiousness which made possible the building of such architectonic masterpieces. The Duomo is one of the strangest historical buildings in Europe: its building took more than five (5!) centuries. They started in 1385 (constitution of the "fabrica ambrosiana", the corporation which directed the construction; the name comes from St. Ambrosius, patron of Milan), while the most recent part of the Dome, the front, was started in 1889 and completed in 1965, when the last brass door was added. This happened because of many reasons: changes in the citizens' taste (e.g. the gothic decorations were heavily criticized during the XVII century), lack of money (expecially during wars and famines), the many polytical vicissitudes of the dukedom of Milan, which was dominated by the Viscontis (1395-1450), Sforzas (1450-1535), Kingdom of Spain (1535-1706), Austrian Empire (1706-1797), Napoleon I (1797-1805), Kingdom of Italy (1805-1814), and the Austrian Empire again (1814-1859). Perhaps this is the reason why we finished it only after the reunification of Italy! (1861). Today the Duomo is complete (even if it lacks the bell tower), and can be judged for what it is: an astonishing "museum in the open air". Many famous italian artists gave their contribution to the Duomo: the most notable were Giovannino de'Grassi, Bramante, Francesco di Giorgio and Leonardo da Vinci (which sketched some plans for the dome). We do not know however who was the planner. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I must admit this was a *very* difficult image to model! The color of the Duomo was a big question. Its shade is very uniform: the same kind of stone (a kind of granite) was probably used both for bricks and statues; if I had followed this rule in the model, the raytraced image would have had been quite monotonous. So I used shadows and "fake" colors (e.g. bricks) in order to increase the interest. I am not able to decide if this is enough or not: after having worked for so many days on the image, *everything* seems monotonous to me now! I was really pleased while modeling the various decorations, but placing them in the right place was a very boring job! The basic shapes used in the creation of this image are height fields (arches and the window frame), blobs (various decorations), sphere sweeps, Julia fractals (can you find them?) and CSG objects. The two statues were made with sPatch. Some notes: - The oblique part of the transversal wall was modeled with CSG and shear transformations. Decorations are placed without using shearing. - The window glass is a CSG shape made by a box and two intersecting cylinders (this caused me more than an headache; there is something strange in POV when using cylinders in CSG!). This shape was used also in a CSG difference with the wall with decorations. I had to avoid any intersection with the arches: being HFs, the subtraction would have led to strange artifacts. - The buildings reflected in the window are simple gray boxes. I chose a light color for them in order to leave the reflected arches visible (*slightly* visible: they originate the black shadow on the bottom left of the window). - Bricks are simple boxes placed by a macro. Texture is randomly chosen for each of them. Note that the real bricks are not so pink: their color is almost exactly like the one I've used for the arches. - The ladder (on the top left of the image) is made by cylinders and boxes. The zip file contains a large-sized image (2048x2048). Maurizio Tomasi