Pantheon Deorum

May 2007

The Pantheon in ancient Rome was a temple dedicated to all gods. Its concrete dome was meant to represent the dome of heaven and consisted of five rings with 28 sections. I noticed that this coincided with the five visible planets and decided to create a picture with this theme. The model was based on the original Pantheon, which featured niches and columns on the level under the dome rather than a square design with window-like features as it is now. I built a single slice of each level and then radially cloned it to get the full rotunda. Textures were painted with my Wacom Graphire tablet. The starfield and the planets on the dome, volumetric lighting, lens flare and ambient occlusion effects (from the SG_Amb_Occ plugin) were added by rendering separate passes. The starfield texture used was a full sky infrared map from the 2 Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS). It was already in rectangular (or linear) projection, so it was mapped spherically on the dome. It shows the Milky Way as a brighter band of stars running vertically down the middle. Constellations, unfortunately, are not very visible since the normal stars in visible light do not seem to show up as well in the infrared image. I've tried to position the field to reflect the position of the stars in Rome on a summer afternoon but the positioning was done by eyeballing and so it is not accurate at all.

• Starfield / all sky map: 2MASS/J. Carpenter, T. H. Jarrett and R. Hurt (from Cool Cosmos - Astronomical All Sky Maps).
• Planets: James Hastings-Trew's Planet Texture Map Collection