For the project, I decided to create an image of the LDS Temple in Cardston that would be easily recognized by those that had seen it. The image that I had to work from did not give a lot of detail about the front entrance, so I decided to keep the building symentrical. This would be closer to how the building itself looked before renovations in the early part of the 1990's.

I started off with the main rectangle that is in the center of the structure, after which I added rectangles for the sides of the building. On the top of the center portion is a small four-sided pyramid, which was completed after a few failed attempts, by using an isosurface that came out of the tutorials for POV-Ray (it is really amazing how much information is really in there). I had to rotate the original pyramid 45 degrees to get it to properly line up with the building.

After the main outline was completed I started adding detail such as the beams above and to the sides of the windows, the windows cutouts and so forth. While doing most of this I knew that there were probably better ways of programming the many details, using the different directives available, but I had to pick and chose what to learn. One of the features that I really liked about many of the images in the Hall of Fame was how realistic some of them were. As I searched to find how this was accomplised I found that a feature called radiosity played a major part in these images. Radiosity settings allows POV-Ray to not only illuminate that which is in direct light, but also have those surfaces act as a light source to other surfaces. The best example of such a light in the real would be the moon. Without radiosity settings the image loses a lot of the light that is there otherwise.

As I moved to texturing the temple, I was afraid that the brick pattern would be difficult to do, but found, to my delight, that there is a single command to create that pattern. The remaining texture comes based on the texture T_STONE9 frome the stones.inc file. I made modifications to the colors and other settings to get the look I wanted. The sky is made from a sky_sphere that took some time to get the right colors. Not too much difference in the gradiant colors, but enough to look realistic. The clouds are based on the bozo pigment. I had hoped to work more with the grass, as it is now just a checker pattern of two different shades of green, but I spent too much time on other parts of the project.

The last detail that I added was the glass in the different windows. I wanted the windows to look as though you could almost see thru them. Again, I don't think I really accomplished this, due to time constraints, but overall I am very pleased with how the image turned out. I especially like the floating bowls.