"Lonnie" <lon### [at] yahoocom> wrote:
> Stunning work.  I especially like the coffered vaulting.  Now where are the

Thanks.  The ceiling (including barrel vaults) is made, basically, of
multiple layers of a rather large amount of fairly simple trigonometry.  It
took me awhile to figure out how to do the crossvault "seams" (crossovers),
and getting everything to line up decently enough took some trial and
error.  The earliest models used CSG, but it looked plastic and utterly
fake, like everything was covered in a single sheet of formica (and took
much longer to render than using a building block approach).

> pools of water with steaming media?

That would be the caldarium (hot bath, a Turkish bath of today) - haven't
depicted that yet. ;>

> Roman philosopher-statesman Seneca wrote, "We have become so luxurious that
> we will have nothing but precious stone to walk upon."

I read a quote from back then that there was so much gleaming marble Rome
looked rather like it was covered in a carpet of snow when viewed from a
hilltop (except of course, I would think, for nearly everything being
roofed in brick roofing tiles, and the significant fraction of the city
consisting of squalid tenements wouldn't have looked exactly gleaming from
any distance).  But for a denarii (about US$0.25) even the poorest of
Romans could spend the day in the greatest general health clubs the world
has ever seen (and also likely the noisiest from other quotes I've read).

At some point I'd like to add a frigidarium (cold water pool, essentially a
modern public pool) to its left, with its own elaborate wall based on the
Thermae of Diocletian, but print-grade renderings at least (3200 x 2400 or
higher) require such detail as it is that POV-Ray alone (initially at
least) uses 3/4 of the 1G RAM my machine has.  I do _not_ want to try doing
a rendering with the machine heading into swapfile land, slowly thrashing a
HDD.  If I can figure out how to automatically minimize away-facing details
based on the viewpoint and zoom chosen...

Roger

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