no textures added yet. any suggestions?
i’d like to add coloured windows, but i don’t know how i should realize it.
the scene has only one light source (spotlight with halo).
rendered with yafray 0.7 (quality was “higher”)
i’ll add a flying spaghetti monster later 
Looks great so far!
I think it could use a little more light, but that’s just picking nits.
Looks beeeutiful, I would try another light…maybe an orangish color or blue.
Colored windows can be a bit tricky. There are some good tutorials out there on faking volumetric light using dupliframes. It might not be the best situation to use such a technique but it might be worth a shot, who knows.
As for recommendations on the glass, couldn’t you find some stained glass windows on the internet in some stock photo archive that you could UV map onto some planes? You could then add some lamps to fake the colored light bleeding into the room? Just a thought.
Modeling is great and I like the ambience so far. You have to give a sense of scale somewhere though. Most people have never been in a cathedral and don’t realize how big they are.
thank you for your comments! i started another rendering last night and it took me 36 hours. i need a sgi or cray…
if anyone has an idea how to realize coloured windows (colouring the spotlight/halo) please let me know it!
I thot that blender’s raytracer could accomplish pretty good effects with colored glass since 2.32… ( http://www.blender.org/cms/Rendering_options.33.0.html - scroll down to the Ray Transparency section) I know this doesn’t do volumetric colors, like I assume you’d want (which would look awesome…) so maybe something like Desoto’s suggestion might work for that…?
Sweet scene, BTW! Looking forward to seeing this in FP!
Quite impressing images…
You do know that Yafray 0.08 is out and much faster?
And there’s even an optimized Version by Lynx that works 20%-25% faster!
You can get it here: http://yafray.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=555&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=15
Also don’t use these high settings, there are more efficient ways to improve render quality with Yafray:
Use a maximum GI Quality of “Medium” and a shadow Quality of 0.800 to 0.900
Then use refinement to optimize the solution, the lower the better, a refinement of 0.050-0.005 should give you even better image quality than your current picture while being far faster, as samples are only used where necessary…
Hope that helps a little
Rinne
Thank you!
Yes i tried Yafray 0.8 but it crashes for some reason
And unfortunately i can’t use the optimized version from the forum, because i only have a mac 
but i’ll try those quality settings.
Nice shots! A few suggestions … (natch)
(1) There’s a little light-play on the lower edges of the lower windows that seems a little unnatural.
(2) When shooting inside of a cathedral, a professional photographer must resort to a lot of hidden lights in order to bring “light into the darkness.” You don’t want to be without detail in the shadows, such as in the lower left side of this image. Whether the light source is “practical” (visible) or hidden, it is needed. It’s also nice when you inject a few warm colors into some of that light. I personally don’t feel that you need to have any “explanations” whatsoever for this additional light. To me, it is perfectly acceptable to use the “ambient light” feature to control general contrast.
(3) The last two shots definitely went the wrong way: one is much too dark, and the other has a muddy “wash” all over it. Neither of these helps the picture.
(4) The circular window in the top of the tall window at the altar of the church appears quite pixelated, because the ribs that form this detail are small at this distance and there simply isn’t a lot of screen-resolution with which to depict it. I don’t really think that the window was improved from the original by this change.
(5) Even in the very first image, I had the impression of a cathedral church… nice basic lighting, color’s good, seeing cloud details outside is a nice touch, good overall illumination of shadows except the lower floors. In other words, a really nice feel to it. I would therefore be very sparing in what details I chose to add to this picture. I think it’ll work very well as a rather austere image.
(6) Always pay close attention to the contrast. In your original shot you had much better control on this vital aspect of the image than is evidenced by the later revisions. Here you have brilliant sunlight pouring into a church … but throughout that church there are (almost) no areas that are under-exposed. The light fills the church and suffuses through it. That’s part of the reason why the church does not seem gloomy. Although the brilliant sunlight is pouring onto the stone floor, that light is being offset by reflected light from the inside of the church, including the distinctly-blue light that pours down from the sky from everywhere but the direction of the sun itself.