TITLE: Wells Cathedral
NAME: Gary MacKinnon
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: gary@mackinnon.com
TOPIC: Worlds Within Worlds
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: jgmcath.jpg
ZIPFILE: jgmcath.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.5 beta

RENDER TIME: 
    1 hour

HARDWARE USED: 
    Home grown dual 1700+ Athlon XPs, 1 Gig Ram

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


This is a symbol of the medieval world reflected within a glass and steel 
symbol of the modern world.  All of this within the much greater natural 
world symbolized by the tree.  



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


This is my first submittal. The source is all Povray text.  No 
modeller was used.  

The reflected image is Wells Cathedral which was built in the 12th
Century.  I wish I could say I modeled the cathedral in CSG but...
well, next time.  The image is a 2D photo found on the Internet. 
Apologies. I prefer the purist approach.

The glass panels are isosurfaces with a low frequency 3D noise 
function used to create the slightly imperfect surfaces. 

The tree comes from my own tree macro. I've tried many of the 
available tree macros but have never been happy with the results
so I wrote my own.  This macro is not ready for public 
consumption but if I ever get around to cleaning it up I'll publish 
it. ( There should be a science of the mathematics of plant growth. )

The leaves come from leaf photos which have been mapped to 
transparent CSG objects to give them their shape.

The sun is a small area light which provides a soft edge to the 
tree shadow. 

To give it one added dimension of interest I used Nathan Kopp's
nkflare macro to provide the lens highlights.