Planetskier: Pećina Beli Kop

Pećina Beli Kop is a small cave in Sremski Karlovci, in mid-western Serbia, northwest of Belgrade. The coordinates are N 45.13654 E 19.85772. The cave sits under a sandstone cliff that appears to have eroded, forming the cave. The cave floor is actually a large sandpit itself, and difficult to walk up and down.

The cave is at the backyard of a small church or monastery. If you visit the cave, do visit the church as well.

I also wondered about the origins of the cave, could it be a quarry, perhaps used for getting the stone for the monastery? But there are not cut marks in the cave. So maybe natural? At least that is what I have tentatively concluded.

There's very little information elsewhere in the Internet about this cave. You can read the Google Maps entry, or the monastery's wikipedia page.

I of course took a 3D scan of the cave, see below for a picture. The model can be access here in GLTF, Blender, and STL formats. But it is easiest rotated on your own browser if you click this link.

I also made a small video about the cave using Blender, the 3D processing tool:

Blender is not the easiest tool to use for first timers (or more experienced users for that matter). Here's how to make a fly-through video in Blender:

In your Blender model, you need to configure or create a camera object and a light object, and attach them together. The light will provide light as the camera travels through the model in the animation we are about to set up. Attaching two objects together happens via select the light, then the camera, pressing Ctrl - P and then choosing the "Object (Keep Transform)" choice in the menu.
Select the camera, light, and your 3D model. Then in the 3D view, press the key "i" once, and a menu about key frame configuration should appear. Choose "Location & Rotation".
Once the above is all set up, use the Shift-F to enter the fly through mode (you may need to configure Blender to recognize the Shift-F).
In Fly Through mode, use 'w' to go forward, 's' to go backward, and 'a' or 'd' to pan sideways. Press 'i' to insert a fixed frame for your animation. You will only need a few fixed frames, Blender will interpolate your position for moving between the fixed frames.
Click on Render Animation to produce an animation image sequence. This will output a number of image files in the directory specified in the output part of the Blender tool settings in the right side of the Blender window.
With the set of images you can use, for instance, Quicktime to import them and then save them as a video file.

As you may know, I have also written a piece of software, Cave Outliner, that takes 3D models as inputs and draws. Another example of the use of this software can be found in my article about the Austrian Schneefleckhöhle cave. That article has also the instructions on how to make 3D cave scans, and how to use the Cave Outliner to generate maps from them. Here's the resulting map from Pecina Beli Kop:

The full PDF of the map is here.

Other pictures:

The church:

Under the all-seeing eye of the lord?

Read more urban exploration stories from theurbanexplorer.net, and other underground stories from planetcaver.net. Read the full Planetskier series at planetskier.net, or all blog articles from Blogspot or TGR. Photos and text (c) 2022 by Jari Arkko. All rights reserved.

This article was originally published in the Planetskier Blogspot article series.

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