TITLE: Alexander VIII's vision
NAME: Yves Vanhellemont
COUNTRY: Belgium
EMAIL: yvanhellemont@yahoo.com
TOPIC: Architecture
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: pozzo.jpg
ZIPFILE: pozzo.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.5

TOOLS USED: 
    My mind and bare hands

RENDER TIME: 
    60 h 2 min

HARDWARE USED: 
    800 MHz Pentium III

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


Pope Alexander VIII is sitting down in his armchair on a warm afternoon,
somewher in summer 1690, in his papal appartments in the Vatican. Next to him
is standing a wooden model which one of the famous contemporary
architects/painters of his days, Fra Andrea Pozzo, made as a study for
constructing the belltowers for St-Peter's basilica in Rome. Andrea Pozzo was
mainly known for his festive (temporary) architecture, the staging of
(religious) festivities, and his striking illusionist baroque paintings (of
which the ceiling decoration of the church of San Ignazio in Rome is definitely
the most famous and impressive). 
A few decades after the disaster with Gianlorenzo Bernini's overwhelming design,
where the partially constructed towers had to be demolished because of
stability problems, the pope is dreaming to finally, FINALLY, complete the
basilica. That way he is hoping to inscribe his name in the list of popes who
have contributed to the splendour of the Vatican. And that is why he ordered
this wooden model, as an appetizer for the real belltowers, whose construction
will start in due time... As the sun is entering the salon, and the temperature
is rising on this sultry summer afternoon, the pope is falling asleep, seeing,
as in a fata morgana, one of the two completed towers outside of the window...


A nice story, and it could have been real... BUT... I don't know if pope
Alexander VIII was planning to construct towers for the basilica. I don't even
know of a design Fra Andrea Pozzo made for the belltowers of St-Peter's
Basilica. It's getting worse: even the design used in this scene is not
Pozzo's. Actually, I started with one of Pozzo's designs, from his "Perspectiva
Pictorum et Architectorum", but ended up with something completely different,
although part of the original features of his design are still present. For all
of you who had the pleasure of seeing St-Peter's basilica in real life, you
probably have noticed that there aren't any belltowers present nowadays. Up to
my knowledge there hasn't even been any attempt to construct belltowers for the
basilica after Bernini had tried it. Ah, if only phantasy could become real...
well, that's what baroque theatre and scenery is all about, imagination,
non-existing worlds, marvel and splendor...

Models for architectural works were of high value. Some of them were and still
are considered as valuable treasures: as historical evidence, but also as
precious works of art. A famous example is the model for the drum and dome of
St-Peter's by Michelangelo (a model thanks to which has been proven that
Michelangelo's design for the dome was stable, and that the stability problems
occuring throughout the 18th and 19th century, were due to the changes carried
out by Michelangelo's pupil della Porta). 
Another well known example is da Sangallo's model for the entire St-Peter's
basilica, a model that shows a previous design for the basilica (and that
learns us to be grateful that this design was never executed!). 
Usually these models were made out of wood, but a famous exception to this was
the model that Bernini made for the Four Rivers fountain at the Piazza Navona
in Rome, a model in silver! It was a model Bernini made at the occasion of a
contest for designing a fountain to be located on the centre of the piazza. Did
he won the contest by the striking design, or just by the fact that the 'jury'
was overwhelmed with the glitter of the silver model? Judge for yourself, to me
the piazza looks splendid with Bernini's fountain! I am definitely NOT
pretending to be a first-class designer like Bernini, so I thought a simple
wooden model would be quite sufficient in this POV-scene...


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


For all of you who were hoping to learn some new tricks, I have to disappoint
you: since I studied and work in the conservation of historic buildings, and I
am NOT a computer wizzard, I'm not the kind of person to use complicated
programmes or tools or tricks. So what you see here is actually a pretty
straightforward CSG construction, built up completely by myself out of spheres,
boxes, cones, toruses etc... edited by hand and with a lot of patience, without
using any editor or alike. Well, that way of working seems a bit old-fashioned
by now, but working in conservation also means working in an old-fashioned way
sometimes ;-) The architectural elements, corniches, columns, ... are all
modelled after the renaissance architect Vignola.

And I'm more of a sculptor, not really into colour, so designing textures is not
really my cup of tea. All of the stone textures were readily taken from the
standard povray include files. I only lowered the ambient values to get a
better contrast. The window glass, the wood of the window were designed by
myself. The colour of the sky, and the colour of the light from the sky and the
sun, were also made by myself (trial and error...). Actually, I was forced to
do this, since I only found out quite late about the competition's topic, so
there really wasn't much time to do a lot of new things (OK, I realize this is
a bit contradicting the ancient method of modelling, which takes an awful lot
of time, but that's what you get with irrational people ;-))

The lighting of the scene is made out of two parts. A kind of ambient lighting
coming from the sky sphere (made out of several large area lights), and
furthermore a smaller circular area light, representing the sun. To all of this
radiosity is added, but because of lack of experience, and lack of time, I just
used the default radiosity parameters. The result of this wasn't quit enough
for me, so I added a horizontal white plane, invisible on the scene, which
improved things a lot.

Finally, camera blur was included to create depth. 

Another thing, because I had to work in a hurry, and I could only work during
the breaks at work, and sometimes after working hours (I don't have a computer
at home, imagine that! I 'learnt' to use POVray at my father's PC when I was
still living with my parents). So there aren't any comments in the files, and
all of the names of the objects are in dutch... hopefully that doesn't cause
too much inconvenience when you want do decipher things. And besides that, the
scene is far from being optimized. So I guess there are plenty of possibilities
to diminish the rendering time.





