TITLE: Exeter Cathedral NAME: Justin Higgins COUNTRY: Australia EMAIL: jhiggins@webone.com.au WEBPAGE: http://www.exeter-cathedral.org.uk/Welcome.html TOPIC: Worship COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: jh_cath.jpg RENDERER USED: megapovplus-0.5.0.2.5b TOOLS USED: blender, vi, gimp RENDER TIME: 4 Hours 8 mins HARDWARE USED: Pentium iii 733 - 128 mb RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: This image is a heavily simplified version of the Exeter Cathedral in England, I picked this because this is my first attempt at a raytraced image and I wanted something that I could simplify and enter into the competition for some comments. The above webpage is the cathedral's homepage and has pictures of the cathedral, you can clearly see that I don't do it any justice at all, there are immense amounts of texture from the walls I am missing as well as any number of ajoining buildings, surrounding landscape and the like. I'm not affiliated in any way with the cathedral, it just came up in a google search. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The main cathedral was modeled in blender (www.blender.nl) which is a free 3d modeler/renderer made by a company called NotANumber. The shapes used the cathedral are mostly very simple as I was learning the basics of blender as I went along. The trees were downloaded from 3dcafe and added from .DXF files, then the whole model was exported to povray format using NAN's povexport.py python script. This exporting process took over 10 hours on my machine as blender uses up to 800megs of ram to export to povray format. The resulting povray file was 186M and is the reason I have been unable to include my source.zip file with this submission, if anyone is keen to see the source file, please email me and I will arrange for an ftp transfer. The tiles on the roof are each seperate mesh objects and the ground is a deformed and smoothed grid array. The water texture was done entirly in povray. I used vi to edit the povray scene description file and moved the camera, textures and some lightsources descriptions to another file, which I then included. I tweaked some texture definitions, using glass.inc and stones.inc, I also added a skysphere and lots of fog and focal blur in an attempt to hide my lack of background. The last thing I did was to add area lighting so soften to shadows slightly. Gimp was used to convert to .jpg and to add my name to the bottom. In the later versions of the exports I did from blender there seems to be a black object sticking out of nowhere and going into the distance, I have no idea where this came from and I've run out of time to go through the 190 odd megs of source code in detail to be able to find it, so unfortunately it will have to stay. Anyway, I look forward to some feedback on my first image.