EMAIL: yvanhellemont@yahoo.com NAME: Yves Vanhellemont TOPIC: Architecture COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Alexander VIII's vision COUNTRY: Belgium WEBPAGE: RENDERER USED: Povray 3.5 TOOLS USED: My mind and bare hands RENDER TIME: 60 h 2 min HARDWARE USED: 800 MHz Pentium III IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Pope Alexander VIII is sitting down in his armchair on a warm afternoon, somewher in summer 1690, in his papal appartments in the Vatican. Next to him is standing a wooden model which one of the famous contemporary architects/painters of his days, Fra Andrea Pozzo, made as a study for constructing the belltowers for St-Peter's basilica in Rome. Andrea Pozzo was mainly known for his festive (temporary) architecture, the staging of (religious) festivities, and his striking illusionist baroque paintings (of which the ceiling decoration of the church of San Ignazio in Rome is definitely the most famous and impressive). A few decades after the disaster with Gianlorenzo Bernini's overwhelming design, where the partially constructed towers had to be demolished because of stability problems, the pope is dreaming to finally, FINALLY, complete the basilica. That way he is hoping to inscribe his name in the list of popes who have contributed to the splendour of the Vatican. And that is why he ordered this wooden model, as an appetizer for the real belltowers, whose construction will start in due time... As the sun is entering the salon, and the temperature is rising on this sultry summer afternoon, the pope is falling asleep, seeing, as in a fata morgana, one of the two completed towers outside of the window... A nice story, and it could have been real... BUT... I don't know if pope Alexander VIII was planning to construct towers for the basilica. I don't even know of a design Fra Andrea Pozzo made for the belltowers of St-Peter's Basilica. It's getting worse: even the design used in this scene is not Pozzo's. Actually, I started with one of Pozzo's designs, from his "Perspectiva Pictorum et Architectorum", but ended up with something completely different, although part of the original features of his design are still present. For all of you who had the pleasure of seeing St-Peter's basilica in real life, you probably have noticed that there aren't any belltowers present nowadays. Up to my knowledge there hasn't even been any attempt to construct belltowers for the basilica after Bernini had tried it. Ah, if only phantasy could become real... well, that's what baroque theatre and scenery is all about, imagination, non-existing worlds, marvel and splendor... Models for architectural works were of high value. Some of them were and still are considered as valuable treasures: as historical evidence, but also as precious works of art. A famous example is the model for the drum and dome of St-Peter's by Michelangelo (a model thanks to which has been proven that Michelangelo's design for the dome was stable, and that the stability problems occuring throughout the 18th and 19th century, were due to the changes carried out by Michelangelo's pupil della Porta). Another well known example is da Sangallo's model for the entire St-Peter's basilica, a model that shows a previous design for the basilica (and that learns us to be grateful that this design was never executed!). Usually these models were made out of wood, but a famous exception to this was the model that Bernini made for the Four Rivers fountain at the Piazza Navona in Rome, a model in silver! It was a model Bernini made at the occasion of a contest for designing a fountain to be located on the centre of the piazza. Did he won the contest by the striking design, or just by the fact that the 'jury' was overwhelmed with the glitter of the silver model? Judge for yourself, to me the piazza looks splendid with Bernini's fountain! I am definitely NOT pretending to be a first-class designer like Bernini, so I thought a simple wooden model would be quite sufficient in this POV-scene... DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: For all of you who were hoping to learn some new tricks, I have to disappoint you: since I studied and work in the conservation of historic buildings, and I am NOT a computer wizzard, I'm not the kind of person to use complicated programmes or tools or tricks. So what you see here is actually a pretty straightforward CSG construction, built up completely by myself out of spheres, boxes, cones, toruses etc... edited by hand and with a lot of patience, without using any editor or alike. Well, that way of working seems a bit old-fashioned by now, but working in conservation also means working in an old-fashioned way sometimes ;-) The architectural elements, corniches, columns, ... are all modelled after the renaissance architect Vignola. And I'm more of a sculptor, not really into colour, so designing textures is not really my cup of tea. All of the stone textures were readily taken from the standard povray include files. I only lowered the ambient values to get a better contrast. The window glass, the wood of the window were designed by myself. The colour of the sky, and the colour of the light from the sky and the sun, were also made by myself (trial and error...). Actually, I was forced to do this, since I only found out quite late about the competition's topic, so there really wasn't much time to do a lot of new things (OK, I realize this is a bit contradicting the ancient method of modelling, which takes an awful lot of time, but that's what you get with irrational people ;-)) The lighting of the scene is made out of two parts. A kind of ambient lighting coming from the sky sphere (made out of several large area lights), and furthermore a smaller circular area light, representing the sun. To all of this radiosity is added, but because of lack of experience, and lack of time, I just used the default radiosity parameters. The result of this wasn't quit enough for me, so I added a horizontal white plane, invisible on the scene, which improved things a lot. Finally, camera blur was included to create depth. Another thing, because I had to work in a hurry, and I could only work during the breaks at work, and sometimes after working hours (I don't have a computer at home, imagine that! I 'learnt' to use POVray at my father's PC when I was still living with my parents). So there aren't any comments in the files, and all of the names of the objects are in dutch... hopefully that doesn't cause too much inconvenience when you want do decipher things. And besides that, the scene is far from being optimized. So I guess there are plenty of possibilities to diminish the rendering time.