Free Carrara Model of St Peter's Basilica

Yofiel

A few more improvements are planned in a later update, but the basic model is now available for download. After putting several weeks into reducing the model size without losing detail, I was able to host it on my own website here (now 6MB instead of the original 50MB). I put this up so you could have a chance to say what you would like changed, and ask any questions about the design before I finalize it, so please feel free to comment on any changes you would like in the final version. 

http://www.yofiel.com/software/205-3d-carrara-model-of-st-peter-s-basilica

 

aspin

Is this a music driven model?

WendyLuvsCatz

LOL

yes Fenrics delete keyframes plugin on children after selecting all came in handy 

lovely model but like many of us you forgot the scrubber can accidently be somewhere other than 0

Yofiel

I should delete the design keyframe, thank you. 

WendyLuvsCatz

no worries Howie Farkes even has done it 

I need to convert the alpha maps for Octane but looks cool, I might replace the Stature planes with posed DAZ figures instead though

Yofiel

Well, if you'd like to combine work on that, perhaps you can choose some to replace with figures, there being >100 in total it will be quite difficult to render all of them as figures in one scene. 

I uploaded a new version and added back some corinthian pillars I forgot to put back after redesigning the front. I think v1.1 fixes the keyframe issue. 

Yofiel

Also, I added a download file of 50 source JPEGs for the higher-resolution statues that have been kindly provided, but I haven't made skewed, clipped and masked many of them yet. The two statues on the right in the below clip are the higher resolution versions. The ballustrade is spline modeled with a single master. 

PhilW

Very nice modelling and texturing! Here is a quick test render with a changed environment and render settings, but no changes to the model itself.  Only one major issue - where are all the crowds and queues!!

Headwax

thanks Yofiel :)

 

Dartanbeck

Wow! Thank you so much for this wonderful model!

Nice job so far! :)

WendyLuvsCatz

if I use figures for statues they will be decimated obj done using polyreduce in UUW3D

only an idea so far, may even try makehuman ones instead of DAZ so can share them

Dartanbeck

Yofiel said:

Well, if you'd like to combine work on that, perhaps you can choose some to replace with figures, there being >100 in total it will be quite difficult to render all of them as figures in one scene. . 

One of the (many, many, many) things I love about Carrara is its ability to handle massive numbers of figures without taxing the render engine too bad. For example, this image holds 1,321 of Predatron's LoRez people. 11 different individual figures for variety, the rest are replicated onto an invisible vertex object I've made to get them all where I wanted them. I took your model and brought it into my Woodlands kit, Sub-D smoothed the dome roof by 1 and added the texture map(s) to the Highlight and Bump channels. I love this piece!

PhilW

Hey - there's the crowds - great job Dart!

DUDU

Thanks for this superb model !

Splendid render Dart !

Dartanbeck

Thanks ;)

Yofiel, quite the interesting site you've got there... I love it!

Steve K

DUDU said:

Thanks for this superb model !

Splendid render Dart !

I agree.

Milo

Thank you!

Stezza

wow.. thanks.. looks great.. and dart's render... wow... 

Max Turlad

WOW!!!  I live in Rome, this view of St Peter is: fantastic! Great job dad!

Dartanbeck

Thanks, Son! ;)

WendyLuvsCatz

I am working on some makehuman statues

 

so far have this

 

Yofiel

What I suggest is making 3D models on the two statues in the courtyard first (Peter and Paul), as they are the largest and most detailed outside St Peters. 

I have made hi-res PNGs of all the statues on the East side of the colonnade.

http://www.yofiel.com/software/mac-and-pc-apps/205-3d-carrara-model-of-st-peter-s-basilica

If someone can describe a simple procedure to make alpha masks from PNGs, I will substitute them into the main model so it will work in 

EDIt: so far I have found the following me3thod which works in CS4 (there are newer methods in later versions of Photoshop but I have CS4): 

1. Select the layer in the “Layers” palette.
2. From the main menu, select “Layer”->“Add Layer Mask”->“Reveal All.”
3. Alt-click (Windows) / option-click (Mac) the layer mask thumbnail image. 
4. From the main menu, select “Edit”->“Fill”. Set to use black at 100% opacity and press “OK.”

I will try setting up a script to generate them all automatically. 

Roygee

Thank you for making this available - very well done and obviously a lot of love and work went into it:)

Haven't had a chance to get into it in depth - just wondering whether this was made in C8.5 and if there is some difference between that and the 8.1 I'm using that gives strange results?

The first pic is a screencap, showing the textures are fine - although under the shaders tab it shows that no shaders are assigned?  The second is a render of the same view - most of the textures are invisible, although I could not see anything obvious in the shader tree to suggest alpha.

Any ideas of what may be causing the render issue?

Dartanbeck

The shaders are made using a single Layer List shader for the whole object. There are lots of those in the scene.

As for the rendering issues, yeah... he must be using 8.5 which defaults texture maps to "Fast Mip-Map" which is not supported in 8.1.

Fenric's "Advanced Shader Teaker" can change all shaders at once from Fast Mip Map to the 8.1 default filtering: "Sampling". Doing it all by hand can take forever on a project of this size. 

With Yofiel's permission, I could use Fenric's tool to convert them and send him a "pre-Carrara 8.5" shader set to offer on his site.

WendyLuvsCatz

The detailed pics give a better idea how to pose my togared figure though I see there is a tad more toga than I made!!!

Dartanbeck

I love your statue, Wendy! Can't wait to see more! ;)

Dartanbeck

Yofiel said:

 

I will try setting up a script to generate them all automatically. 

If that doesn't work out, I would be happy to make trans maps for this. Might take some time to get all 50....

evilproducer

The color channel will support transparencies without the need for an alpha, or trans-map. If your image editor supports transparencies such as Photoshop, you could edit the photos of the statues to delete the backgrounds, thus leaving the statue surrounded by a transparent area. Save it as a .png or .tiff and load it into the shader's color channel and it will respect the transparency.

Dartanbeck

His low res statues are using the pngs in the color channel. The newer ones are jpeg

Roygee

Thanks for the explanation, Dart - I thought it may be something like that.  I do hope he gives you the OK to convert - I'd love to use the model:)

Yofiel

I uploaded png versions of the high-res statue images with transparent backgrounds yesterday. This format uses 'premuiltiplied alpha' for transparency, which implements floating-point values for the colors. The value is generated by an integer color value, multiplied by the alpha value (between 0.0 and 1.0) for each pixel.

As Datanbeck says, the model uses 8.5's mip mapping for faster rendering.  Because the model uses layers, there are relatively few top-level shaders, and they contain a separate layer for each shading domain in each object. I do have fenric's plugin too, and I will generate a version for older carrara users.

The new PNG files also apply skew when necessary, adjust the aspect ratio, and remove other artifacts such as wires and light fixtures. So they are not just the jpegs without transparency. 

Apparently octane does not support pngs with transparency, and that is why I plan to provide separate masks for these files later.