EMAIL: norbert-werner.kern@t-online.de
NAME: Norbert Kern
TOPIC: worship
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: miracle
COUNTRY: Germany
WEBPAGE: not yet
RENDERER USED: MegaPov 0.7
TOOLS USED: Moray 3.1, 3DWin, 3D-Exploration, 3ds2pov, OBJuvPOV, 
            PlantStudio, Poser 4, Rhino, Streamline, Photoshop
RENDER TIME: 5 h 01 min / 490 MB peak memory
HARDWARE USED: PII, 266 MHz, 224 MB RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: In the ending Middle Ages. A traveller looks in astonishment
on a miracle: the gothic cathedral St. Peter in Beauvais. The uncompleted 
church was the highest building of mankind at this time and the highlight of 
gothic architecture.
Even the unfinished cathedral must have impressed everybody, who saw it for the
first time when only few houses had more than 2 stories in that times.
It was a materialistic symbol for the power of spirituality. Such a church 
building however also showed the the wealth of the community and was an 
essential economic factor.
With a donation for the church building one could buy even the pardon of his 
sins and protect himself from purgatory and hell.
Not forgetting the travellers: One could already see the church steeple from 
wide distance, which showed the way from the dangerous woods to the protective
town.
There were actually many secular reasons next to esthetic or philosophical-
religious arguments for worshipping such a church ...

The tower stood only between 1569 and 1573. After only 4 years it felled down 
and was never built up again; the church is yet uncompleted. No other church 
has higher vaults: 47 m (nearly as high as the towers of NotreDame in Paris).



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
The cathedral, the crane, the scaffolding and the town gate was modeled in 
Moray. In my books I found drawings of the floorplan, the elevations and the 
tower. After the buttresses I modeled the tower, then the choir, transept 
and then the details. The buttresses were used again in the tower slightly 
modified.
For the windows in the transept and in the tower I tried a new technique. 
I took parts from fitting drawings or photos, corrected the perspective with 
Photoshop (contained in the zip file) and converted the bitmaps into a vector 
graphic with Streamline. The files were then extruded in Rhino, saved in 3ds 
formate and imported via 3DWin in Moray.
The result isn't bad. However, CSGs or Heightfields would have been better.
I modeled the crane and scaffolding after drawings of the Cologne cathedral 
from the 17th century and the completion in the 19th century.
The town gate is pure fiction as the whole scene beside the cathedrale.
I used a dramatic sky inspired of "Canyon" from Jean Jaques Piqueres with 
40 cloud layers first. However, fog or media didn´t work with this sky. But a 
new sky with only 4 cloud layers worked with fog.
Rider and horse are Poser objects which were imported with OBJuvPOV. My aim 
was to avoid the Poser typical "porcelain"-type skin this time. 
The normal tail of the Poser horse is particularly ugly. I looked for a 
fractal formula to generate a tail from several cylinders. I found such an 
algorithm at Tsutomu Higo´s homepage 
(http://www.asahi Net.or.jp/~ Nj2t Hg/Ilpov5e.htm). 
 With some smaller variations and an imagemap as texture a quite beautiful 
horse's tail arose from 600 single "hairs". The parsing time rose by an hour, 
though. Therefore I saved the tail via filehandle and used the resulting inc 
file.
The mane comes from the internet. Since it seemed too solid, I used an imagemap
as texture and made the dark points transparent with transmit.
I have designed the texture of the horse body. First I used bumpmaps for the
normal component, however I wasn't satisfied at all. However, the normal 
component of the fur texture of Rune Johansen worked very good 
(http ://Rsj.mobilixnet.dk/3 this/Goodies/Goodies.html). 
The rider is a figure of John Malis rendered with mostly own textures.
The saddle dates also from "Poserworld".

On the left a "Splinetree" is the tree in the foreground (approx. 1 week of 
tweaking). On the right below the dead copse consists of 2 identical "Tomtrees" 
The trees a little behind to the right and to the left are "Maketrees".
I thank the Povray masters for the terrific macros .. 
The other trees and bushes are meshes from the net.
Mostly imagemaps were used as bark textures.

I used the wonderful Mur-Macro of Steven Pigeon for the wall. I extended the
macro by random contributions for rotation, translation and the superellipsoid
parameters of every single stone.
 Two stones of the same texture, but slightly different orientation were used
at the three frontmost of the 13 parts of the wall. Through this one can get
quite realistic looking walls.
With while loops the fitting merlons were placed.
In front of every wall part a heightfield with an earth texture, revolved 
around 45 °, was placed. The same heightfields with a grass texture which was 
adjusted transparent with transmit in the dark zones were placed above them 
directly. 
This yields realistic hills overgrown with grass in a very simple way.

In the meanwhile time was running out and nothing was ready. I had to give up 
all thoughts on a ready scene. Because of this a more simple foreground was 
needed. I took an isosurface with 3dnoise as earth and put 5 grass patches by 
means of the Makegrass Macro of Gilles Tran. I inserted random factors for the
height and bending of the stalks and used an imagemap as texture. The grass 
doesn't look regularly with a simple ripples normal and a very shiny finish.
Finally I used a dandelion of PlantStudio, birds and a ladybug (because of the
red paint spot) from the net.

The picture has several faults.
The wall has no natural plant cover and no towers. 
The biggest fault is clearly the absence of smoke from thousands of fire 
places in the town. I simply didn't manage to find out, why I cannot represent
fog and smoke as media objects in MegaPov simultaneously.
The scales of the objects are approximately right and because of this no 
single house roof can be seen.
And-yes-I forgot to render the reins. 

The zip file doesn't contain the church windows and the horse / rider.
Sorry, but 25 MB zipped are too much.
If you want these files, you can send me an email.
To render the image, you have to comment out pferd.inc and reiter3a.inc in 
worship6.pov and turm1.inc, fenster1.inc und querschiff.inc in beauvais6.inc.