A buzzard attacking a dove above the cathedral of St. John.

The idea of the image was an action picture, where you were just walking by a church, notice the buzzard and the dove, and quickly toke a photo of it. So to get this feeling, I didn't want the picture to smooth. I wanted some graininess, which I tried to accomplice primary with the textures and by playing around with the amount of blur samples. The washed out colors and clouded (white) sky was also because of this idea, although I wanted the colors red, green(yellow), blue to be recognizable.
The cathedral of St. John doesn't exist in reality, elements of the architecture are based on the cathedral of Canterbury.
And finally, if you see any symbolic meaning in the image, you are free to interpreted it any way you like :).

With all the features to rival commercial packages (media, photons, radiosity, etc) for me the best part of Pov-Ray is the fantastic scene description language (SDL) with which you can incorporate those features. So to emphasize that I decided to do everything procedural where possible. Also I liked to use the colors Povray uses as primaries (red, green, blue) redish windows, greenish trees, blueish roof tiles and the rest in gray values.

Bricks:
The whole visible cathedral exists of individual bricks. Because I have only 512 MB ram to work with, I thought it would be better to work with meshes. First I made a few bricks with isosurfaces and then converted them with Kevin Loney's macro to meshes. Then I made a macro to stack the bricks. I used the same brick-meshes also for the roof-tiles.

Windows:
The windows are made with a macro I created for the task. To save memory I replaced primitives (spheres and cylinders) with low-poly meshes, but I'm not sure I won very much memory with that, if any. The glass is a crackle pigment with a bump normal.

Trees:
The trees are made with Pov-Tree. I noticed too late that Pov-Tree trees don't lend themselves very much for close ups. So they aren't in the final image as prominent as I wanted.

Additional:
The bell is a lathe I made with SpilinEditor and the birds are handmade CSG's. Because of lack of memory I had to put always sample off in radiosity. With 'always sample on' the lightning would have been even more accurate.
The whole thing lasted four days to render.

Sofware:
Povray 3.6,
Pov-Tree 1.5b (by Tom Aust and Gena Obukhov),
Isosurface to Mesh Approximation Macro (isosurf_KL_JF.inc, by Kevin Loney and Jaap Frank),
POV-Ray triangle mesh compressor v3.0 (by Warp),
SpilinEditor v1.2 (by Alessandro Falappa).

Hardware:
Intel Pentium 4 2.66GhZ 512Mb RAM.

46_source.zip (6627 kb)

Good concept, modelling and composition. However, focal blur is a big mistake, as it makes the image looks like a toy. Also, a more thorough study of gothic architecture would have prevented some annoying approximations.