TITLE: The Pilgrimage to the Kaaba
NAME: Ali Lakhia
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: lakhia@yahoo.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/lakhia/kaaba/
TOPIC: Worship
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: kaaba_su.jpg
ZIPFILE: kaaba_su.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.1g for Windows

TOOLS USED: 
    Photoshop 5.5 (splicing pieces together from output of 2 machines
                           & conversion to jpg),
            Bryce 4.0 (height fields),
            CS-RCS 2.5.140 for Windows (version management)

RENDER TIME: 
    Approximately 3 days, 6 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    AMD K6, 233 MHz, 64MB RAM &
               Pentium III, 550 MHz, 256 RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


My Motivation:   End of last year, I went to Mecca, Saudi Arabia and visited
                 the Holy Kaaba. It was a very enriching experience. I was
                 most impressed with the Islamic architecture and wanted to
                 capture it from my memory into something that would last.

                 I thought this would be best done with a 3D rendering
                 program. I was planning to use Bryce to create the
                 scene. However, it is hard to manage a complex scene with a
                 few thousand objects in Bryce. I had heard of POV-Ray and
                 decided to give it a try.

                 As I was browsing the POV-Ray site, I came across the IRTC
                 competition site and noticed that the theme was worship. You
                 may consider this to be a coincidence. I don't.

                 I decided at that moment that I was going to take part in the
                 competition.  Also, having a deadline made me all the more
                 determined to give this project a high priority rather than
                 putting it in the back burner where it may have lingered for
                 some time and then eventually forgotten.

About The Kaaba: Every year, over 2 million Muslims from all over the world go
                 to Mecca to perform the Hajj (or pilgrimage). The Hajj
                 constitutes as one of the pillars of Islam and is obligatory
                 for every Muslim who is financially and physically fit. One
                 of the rites of Hajj is to circle the Kaaba, join in prayers
                 and seek God's forgiveness.

                 The sacred nature of the Kaaba, also known as the House of
                 God, predates Islam. Tradition says that the Kaaba was built
                 by Adam and was the first house that was built for humanity
                 to worship God. It was rebuilt by Prophet Abraham and
                 Ismail. After sustaining damage from a flash flood, it was
                 reconstructed by Prophet Muhammad.

                 The Hajj pilgrims wear very simple white clothing which
                 erases any distinction between people's status, class and
                 culture. All are equal when they face towards the Kaaba,
                 crouch with their forehead touching the floor in submission,
                 and worship their creator.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


My Strategy:     In any 3D scene, there is a trade off between realism and
                 rendering time. Initially, my strategy was to go strive for
                 realism without much attention to complexity.

                 To achieve realism, my only resources were pictures of the
                 Kaaba found on the internet. To my knowledge, measurements or
                 blueprints of the Kaaba's architecture are not publicly
                 available. Therefore, I printed the pictures of the Kaaba and
                 took measurements of everything. Then I adjusted the
                 measurements for perspective distortion and used those to
                 size the objects.

                 Soon, I realized that my scene was taking a long time to
                 render. The walls were being rendered at 1 pixel/second
                 without focus blur or area lights! With both of them turned
                 on and adding a dozen lights, it took 2 days just to draw
                 most of the sky.

                 Consequently, I ditched the idea of adding objects inside the
                 walls (like ceiling fans and chandeliers). Also, the walls
                 are much wider but I chose to keep them down to four layers
                 since they would not visually impact the scene as much.
                 Furthermore, several objects on the roof of the walls were
                 never added due to time constraints. Lastly, I rendered the
                 final scene without area lights, focus blur and extra lights
                 because I would have missed the deadline.

Methodology:     I extensively employed prisms for the minars. The arches for
                 the upper walls section were created using a quadratic spline
                 prism (cubic spline was too smooth and I needed the top of
                 the arch to be sharp).

                 The glow from the lamps, minars and walls were made using
                 media emission. The orange haze in the sky was created with a
                 ground fog. I tried using a surface of revolution to make the
                 domes but preferred a dome made up of two cones and a
                 cylinder.

                 The building location, color, size and window configurations
                 were all chosen at random. The glowing of the windows were
                 done by simply differencing out a cube with a random diffuse
                 color and a high ambient value, again chosen at random.

                 The people, who are in a crouching position with their
                 forehead touching the floor, consist of very simple primitive
                 objects. The color of their clothes and their size are varied
                 randomly by a small amount to add variance.

                 The lighting for the entire scene was mainly generated from
                 two lights. Both of these were behind the camera to prevent
                 any shadows from falling towards the camera. This was done
                 because the Kaaba is very well lit from all around so shadows
                 fall away from the center rather than towards it.

                 A third shadowless light ensured that nothing in the scene
                 was pitch black.  Other lights were positioned in the lamps
                 on the floor and in the minars.
                 
                 The mountains were generated in Bryce. The mountain in the
                 front and in the far back are the exact same mountain just
                 scaled and translated differently. To achieve the effect of
                 mountains getting darker as the distance progressed, I made
                 all the lights fade with distance.

Challenges:   1. I do have programming experience. But, I knew nothing about
                 POV-Ray. I printed the whole POV-Ray manual and studied it
                 for about a week to familiarize myself with it.

              2. I have done 3D modeling before. Mostly, I have used Bryce to
                 construct scenes with about a few dozen objects. This
                 project, on the other hand uses over 15,000 objects.
                 Luckily, I did not get overwhelmed because I soon realized
                 that having everything in one file was not a good idea.

              3. The minars are shaped like an octagon. However, they are not
                 a perfect octagon since the size of the octagon increases or
                 decreases as height varies.  Therefore, instead of using a
                 single prism for each segment, I utilized a prism for each
                 side of each segment and rotated it 8 times. Also, the prisms
                 had to be tilted at an angle so that each side aligned
                 correctly and for the shape to look seamless. I spent 3
                 straight days working on the trigonometry.

              4. The curving of the outer walls of the Kaaba was tricky.  My
                 plan was to clip the joining sides by the same angle using a
                 plane. Then, I would position them so that no seam would be
                 visible and the domes on top of the lower walls would not
                 look awkward.

                 My plan almost worked. The top wall section looked perfect
                 and the back domes aligned well. However, the front dome was
                 very small and looked like a convex disk.  Another problem
                 were the lower pillars. To conserve the number of objects,
                 instead of using a half pillar on either side of each section
                 of the wall, I used a full pillar on the left side and no
                 pillar on the right side. This resulted in a slight
                 misalignment. At the curvature were 1 full pillar and 1 half
                 pillar with a half pillar gap separating them.

                 Needless to say, these were major flaws and needed to be
                 corrected. I tried various clipping angles for both sides but
                 fixing one problem lead to others. I finally caved in and
                 used a "difference hack" to delete the abnormalities.

              5. I was tempted several times to use image maps. Instead, I
                 experimented with normal maps, color maps, and textures, to
                 achieve what I desired. The only place that I did use an
                 image map was for the Kaaba itself since it had letterings in
                 Arabic sewed in golden thread.

              6. Obtaining the right glow for the wall sections was tough. I
                 wanted a cone shaped glow that would taper off at the ends. I
                 tried various media effects but none would possess the soft
                 edges that I desired. I almost gave up. Then, I had an idea
                 to reuse the spherical glow macro that I had used for the
                 minars, difference out the bottom half, and stretch along the
                 y-axis. This worked and is what you see in the final image.

Acknowledgment:  Referenced Gilles Tran's makelamp.pov file at:
                     http://www.oyonale.com/ressources/english/sources03.htm
                 to create glow effects.

                 Pictures of the Kaaba used for sizing objects can be found at
                 this address:
                     http://islam.org/Culture/MOSQUES/Makkah/images.htm

                 History of the Kaaba, used in part, to write "About The
                 Kaaba" section in this file:
                     http://islamicity.com/mosque/hajj/hajjintro.htm

