The Church on Spilled Blood

By: Anna Korsakova

The Church of Our Savior on the Spilled Blood is one of the most astonishing sights in St. Petersburg, Russia. It stands on the Neva River, which beautifully outlines the building, leaving it the focus of the Nevsky Prospect. The construction started in 1883, after Emperor Alexander the Second was mortally wounded on that spot. It took 24 years to build to build this breathtaking structure- decorated with mosaics both inside and outside.

I decided to build a 3D model of this church because it left a huge impression on me. As beautiful as St. Petersburg is, the Church on Spilled Blood is one of the most magnificent memories that come to mind when thinking about it.

During the fist stages of building the model, I perfected the steeples. To portray correctly their intricate shape, I used a picture of the church as a background on the image plane and drew a curve using the CV curve tool. After creating a curve, I would rotate the curve 360 degrees.

After building all the steeples for the church, I started working my way down. Most of the towers and the other parts of the church are polygons such as cubes, cones, and cylinders. The more intricate curves, such as the columns for the entrances are done using the CV curve tool. Below is the complete model of the church without texture.

After building the model, I started placing textures on it. The gold steeples are simply colored yellow with a slight glow effect added, but most of the other shapes have PSD files as textures. I used a blinn shader for most parts and then added a .psd file texture. For example the textured steeples use a simple photoshop file, repeated several times to get the desired effect.

Most of the other textures are taken from an actual photograph and placed on the shape using a PSD file texture. When dealing with polygons, I was able to take the UV snapshot using the UV texture editor and place the textures exactly where I wanted them in photoshop. For example, the main body of the church is a cube, with a texture taken from a photograph. The UV snapshot provided the outline of where the texture would be placed, so that the front and back parts were upright.

After placing all the textures, I added an ambient light and a camera. I created a NURBs circle around the center of the church and attached the camera to it in the form of a motion curve. This created a fly around view of the building. I also added a NURBs cylinder around the building and added a PSD file as a background and a NURBs plane as a surface for the church to stand on.

When the lighting and camera movement was complete, I started working on the particle system that would create the snow. A particle system is a shape that emits particles from within itself. These particles can be controlled and modified to look like snow, rain, or fireworks.

To create the particle system, I made a NURBs circle from which the particles would be emitted. Then with the circle highlighted I chose the menu option emit from object, attributes. From there I changed the particles per second, set the emitter type to directional, adjusted the speed at which the particles fly, the direction, and the randomness of the particles. In the particle shape attributes I changed the color of the particles by selecting the rgbPP in the Per Particle (Array) Attributes. There I was able to create a ramp of color that would be used in my particles- from white to light grey.

The rendering of the church did not prove to be as easy at it first seemed. The camera movement and the building itself were beautifully rendered using Maya software rendering. However, the particle system and emitter proved to be un-renderable using software rendering. To correctly render the particle system, hardware rendering needed to be used. To render I used the hardware render buffer located in the rendering editors menu. Before rendering a few attributes had to be adjusted- the image format changed to QuickTime image and line smoothing and full image resolution enabled. Then I rendered the sequence in the hardware render buffer. This provided a quick and efficient way to render my movie, with the particle system and emitter, something that would have been impossible using software render.

After the rendering, I used QuickTime to play the sequence and flatten and save it into a movie file.