Desert Temple (construction of)

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By Michael Hecht. This scene is built using Moray, a modeller for the free Persistence Of Vision Raytracer (POV-Ray). As the scene progressed, I saved many of the test renderings, which are presented in order here. This is the first scene I designed with Moray.

PlazaPhase1.jpg (91631 bytes)

When I began creating this scene (as mentioned above) I was new to Moray. What you see here is a collection of cubes and cylinders arranged without any hierarchical structure. Better texturing comes later.

At this point I learned how to use object hierarchies and groups and realized the power they offer. For example, I created a group which holds all of the primitive objects which make up a step. I then created a group called "stair" which holds one step and five references to it (each reference translated to the correct position). Every staircase in the scene can now reference the original group. If I modify the original step, all of the other steps get updated automatically. Adding hierarchies meant basically rebuilding the scene from scratch -- but it was well worth it.

Another texture change, and some more additions to the model. The structure is becoming more complete. I replaced the flat ground with a large sphere, so the structure is sitting on top of its own planet (notice the curved horizon). The sky is also a much larger sphere around the planet and the camera. Spherical ground presents a problem for the flat base of the structure, however, as you can see if you look at the steps ending on the far left of this image: a space shows where the sphere curves away from the bottom.

Here I went back to a flat floor with a nice texture of marbled tiles. The two lower cupolas should each have a basin of water formed from a square hole cut out of the floor (but only the right-hand one does here).

The tiled floor is now a tiled platform in the middle of a desert, and fog creates the hazy appearance of the atmosphere. There are mirrored poles around the edges of the platform.

I added diagonal arches across the top of each cupola by copying one of the original arches and scaling it uniformly by sqrt(2), then rotating the result by 45 degrees.