Hi Cyberdactyl, no, unfortunately iRender doesn't do turbidity (yet?). Their image editor offers haze as a post-render processing option, but that didn't do much for this model. And the texture, well, it's a lame attempt at dirtmapping done in Photoshop... I would need procedurals to do it inside the render application, another option iRender doesn't have. I am so hoping some day the Vray people will finally fix their awful latest release, which is unable to render a model this size, and which has been sitting around uselessly on my PC ever since I, misguidedly, bought it...

I've been experimenting a bit with field of view, and played around in Photoshop with the result. I need to do something about the glass material, it doesn't look very good...

For those of you who are intererested, here are a few examples of the reference material I used. Vitruvius Britannicus is an excellent source, offering complete plans and elevations as well as, in this case, a famous and spectacular birds eye view. Still, modeling the thing soon made it clear that the drawings are not consistent among each other, so at times I had to improvise. There are no lateral views or views of inside courtyards in VB, so for those I relied on a visit, on photographs and even on scenes from the Brideshead Revisited TV-series (excellent!) and movie (awful!).

Jon, I envy you! I have traveled quite extensively but still consider Howard and its environs to be the most beautiful place I've ever been...

Hm, no, unfortunately. Attempts to export this to Kerkythea only make SU crash. That's why I opt for renderers that work inside SU.

You are undoubtedly right though that a little more work on thorough use of components would reduce the file size... I tend to be a bit lax in that way, bad, bad habit... Not that I would expect such a 'cleanup' to solve the export problem, I'm afraid my system simply isn't up to the task.

Tempting thought Pilou... only, where will I put it...?

Adam, I need to get into the iRender material editor more; I barely scratched the surface. But bitmap textures are basically useless, except for detail views; on the large scale patterning will occur. As for the glass, suggestions are welcme! I'm not satisfied with the metal ornaments either.

As far as I've been able to see iRender unfortunately doesn't do AO. I'm still hoping ASGVIS will finally come up with a decent patch for their new, incredibly buggy Vray, which has been sitting on my PC unused for over a month now because it crashes every time I try to render this model. I would be very curious to see what VRAY makes of this!

...iRender turned out another one overnight.

Here's another render. I love this feature of iRender, it actually does true orthogonal renders.

Thanks all! Jopsa, I'd love to texture it, but I would need a renderer that does procedurals (actually I have one, Vray, but it is unable to render models this large ). I think I'll be experimenting in Photoshop instead. Best of all would be to export this to Vue, as someone else suggested, but on my system that is definitely out of the question... (and like SU, Vue is very good at handling its own native format, but not so good at handling imported geometry).

As for stats:
3,446,304 edges
1,527,138 faces
6,682 component instances
3,832 groups

I am on a P4, 2,13 Ghz dual core Vista PC, with 4 GB of RAM and a 'Loser Edition' nVidia card that I will be replacing one of these days... (it messes up shadows completely). The model was finished in SU 7, and SU can handle it without any problem at all; only, when orbiting, components and groups go into box mode. I had several crashes, however, when trying to export large bitmaps.

PS, Jopsa: I found your Pantheon greatly inspiring, it seems to me that operates at an even higher level of detail!

Oh, and did I say thank you yet to Fredo for his brilliant plugins, without which this would have taken another year at least?

Remus, the statues are 3d, but I must adnmit I didn't model them myself. I found them on the internet and only simplified them a bit for use in this model. The bas reliefs on the facade are textures.

Yeah, Charly, I prefer historical buildings too for modeling. But it is indeed rare to find such good reference material as in Vitruvius Brittanicus. It was the Dover reissue of that book which got me going on this project. Actually, VB will allow you to model almost any 18th century English country house; but I think I'll lay off for a while and do something completely different...