Total Time for far view: 1:34:00
Maximum Main Memory Used in Render: 144 Mb
Total Time for close view: 1:40:44
Maximum Main Memory Used in Render: 155Mb
Render Resolution: 1027x768
(On an 800 MHz Athalon Processor with 192 Mb RAM.)
This picture took a LONG time to develop. If I went into all the gory details that I did for the teapot scene, this report would be many pages long. So, I will keep my description of the design detail as concise as it can be.
My first step was to develop a brick texture, which was done easily enough with the "brick" keyword. However, the bricks are what I am most disappointed with in this picture, because the mortar doesn't really show up well on the far walls. After this, I constructed the shape of the church. This was actually my greatest challenge because I didn't have any dimensions I could work with, and I had to only do it by looking at the picture I took (which by the way, is way darker than the church really is... a consequence of my lack of photography skills). The floor, ceiling and stage were also developed in this stage, as well as the doors at the back of the stage.
Once the overall structure was layed out, I added wood the "lattice" work in the back of the stage. I only created one really big wood beam and one small wood beam, and using a while loop, let POV-Ray calculate where they should all go. Then, the church pews were made. I had to custom design three different sizes. I tried earlier to scale just one pew to the three different sizes, but that didn't look right. In fact, the two smaller sizes have only one "rib" of support in the middle, where the large pews have two.
The next step was to add the chairs and the pulpit and speakers on the stage. This was probably the easiest stage because it was simply a union of a bunch of boxes, except for the speakers. If you look closely, there are small reflective round things on each corner, just like in the picture. After this, I went after the musical things. The piano took a bit of ingenuity to build. I used the standard boxes and cylinders for the overall main shape, but I also used prisms for the legs. Unfortunately, you can't really tell that I used prisms for the legs, nor can you tell that I actually created a piano bench either. The drums, I confess, were not entirely my design. POV-Ray comes with a host of sample files, and I stole the drum shape from one of these (thanks to Dan Farmer). I added my own texture to them, and placed them by hand. I also had to build my own cymbals using open cones. The music stands were trivial to build, simply cylinders and boxes.
The background cross and banners were also fairly easy to come up with. The cross is simply two boxes with two cylinders to give it a more textured feel. The banners are bicubic patches with the texture uv_mapped onto them to give them a feel that the texture flows with how the banner hangs. The texture itself is, suprisingly enough, a marble pigment with some turbulence added for a more realistic effect. Notice that I added a light in the back to highlight to the cross, as is done in the picture I took also.
Then I moved on to the ceiling ornaments. The lights have a yellowish fringe because I used an onion pigment to give them this effect. The beams were simply placed in a while loop. The fan is a composition of cylinders, cones, squshed spheres and angles boxes.
Finally, the trees were to added. I used POV-Tree to help me with this. This program dumped out almost 100 megabytes of POV-Ray source code to describe the 4 trees I used. Two of the trees were used twice, so I didn't have to go through the pain of designing any more trees. The tree pots are in are simply cones, squished spheres and lathes with quadratic splines.
To attain the overall feel, I used an area light and specified that it should not cast any shadows (otherwise the scene was littered with them). Jitter and radiosity were used to give it just a bit more of a realistic feel. No post-processing was done.
If I could change anything about my design, other than the brick texture, it would be to add more objects. I could include heat registers, the organ (that is behind the pulpit), the "hymns" board on the pillars, more lights on the ceiling, the exit door on the left side, and windows. I would also have liked to have the dimensions of the church, because it might have been easier to come up with the general shape. I still feel that there is something off about the overall shape of my design.
Distant Picture
Close-Up Picture
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