POV-Ray

[Original Title: “texture_map interpolation does not work correctly for some patterns”]

The below test scene should yield identical textures
T_STRAND1 and T_STRAND2 but this is not the case. Reported
and verified in

http://news.povray.org/povray.general/thread/%3C4cbd804b%241%40news.povray.org%3E/

The problem seems to affect bozo, bumps, dents, granite, spotted,
and maybe wrinkles. The problem was reported earlier in

http://news.povray.org/povray.beta-test/thread/%3C48112367%241%40news.povray.org%3E

with a comment that 3.6 gives the expected results

#declare C_STRAND = color rgb 1;

#declare C_CLEAR  = color rgb 0;

#declare T_STRAND = texture
{
  pigment {color C_STRAND}
}

#declare T_CLEAR = texture
{
  pigment {color C_CLEAR}
}

#declare T_STRANDS1 = texture
{
  pigment
  {
    granite scale 2 color_map
    {
      [0.0 color C_STRAND]
      [0.5 color C_CLEAR]
      [1.0 color C_CLEAR]
    }
  }
}

#declare T_STRANDS2 = texture
{
  granite scale 2 texture_map
  {
    [0.0 T_STRAND]
    [0.5 T_CLEAR]
    [1.0 T_CLEAR]
  }
}

plane
{
  z, 10
  texture {T_STRANDS1}
  //texture {T_STRANDS2}
} 

Add metatags to output images identifying the file as having been created using POV-Ray.

unixoptions.cpp has a getenv(”HOME”) that does an assignment without checking to see if getenv returns NULL.

This causes an immediate and unceremonious segfault in those situations where $HOME is not set such as in the case where povray is launched by a daemon.

Best solution might be to set the home to /tmp and print a warning message about $HOME not being set.

Multi-textured blobs are broken with 3.7 beta 40 when used inside an intersection, as can be demonstrated by the following scene:

#default { texture { pigment { rgb 1 } } }

camera {
  right x*image_width/image_height
  location  <0,1.5,-4>
  look_at   <0,1,0>
}

light_source { <500,500,-500> color rgb 1 }

difference { blob {
  threshold 0.6
  sphere { < 0.75,   0,    0>, 1, 1 texture { pigment { color red 1 } } }
  sphere { <-0.375,  0.65, 0>, 1, 1 texture { pigment { color green 1 } } }
  sphere { <-0.375, -0.65, 0>, 1, 1 }
} }

With POV-Ray 3.7.0 beta 40, the entire blob is rendered with the default texture.

The same problem can be seen with “difference” or “merge” instead of “intersection”.

Omitting the CSG “envelope”, using “union”, or assigning the blob to a variable first and then using it inside an intersection, will yield the expected result.

POV-Ray 3.62 renders all variants as expected.

According to initial analysis, the problem appears to be caused by the dual use of the “MULTITEXTURE_FLAG”, which is used in CSG to indicate use of the “cutaway_textures” feature, and in blobs to indicate per-element texturing. (The same flag is also used in meshes to indicate per-face or per-vertex texturing, so similar problems are to expected there.)

My proposal is to use an entirely separate flag for the “cutaway_textures” feature (the blob and mesh can safely continue to share the MULTITEXTURE_FLAG).

FileBackedPixelContainer uses a FILE* to manage the backing store and under Linux/Unix defines fseek64 to be a kind of incantation of lseek64.

Since fseek64 and fseek64 have return values that are logical opposites this causes an exception to be thrown.

Moreover since the buffer size on a FILE is quite a bit smaller than a line of pixels (in terms of bytes), mostly what’s being done in this function is a lot of sloshing of bytes that don’t do much... which is to say that the intended caching mechanism is getting a very low hit rate now that povray is working in 32×32 pixel per-thread chunks.

The cache miss problem and the volume of bytes read/written grows exponentially as the size of the image grows.

Attached is a replacement function that seems to be working well and should produce a performance increase even under Windows. I originally went with simply fixing the fseek/lseek problem but saw a 10% decrease in render time on 2048×1024-sized images when I made the cache target smaller.

If pretrace_start is set below pretrace_end, POV-Ray will run a high number of pretrace steps (without changing pretrace resolution).

‘povray -H10 -W20 myscene.pov’ will generate a file with a picture 10 pixels high and 20 pixels wide, BUT in the message pane it displays

Image resolution.....20 by 10 (rows 1 to 20, columns 1 to 10)

instead of

Image resolution.....20 by 10 (rows 1 to 10, columns 1 to 20)

or

Image resolution.....20 by 10 (columns 1 to 20, rows 1 to 10) 

polygon objects comprised of multiple “sub-polygons” don’t work properly if start/end points of sub-polygons do not exactly match, as can be demonstrated by the following code:

#default { texture { pigment { rgb 1 } finish { ambient 1.0} } }

camera {
  orthographic
  up 3.5*y
  right 3.5*x*image_width/image_height
  location  <0,0,-4>
  look_at   <0,0,0>
}

polygon { 8,
  // outer triangle
  0.70 * < cos(  0 *pi/180),sin(  0 *pi/180),0>
  0.70 * < cos(120 *pi/180),sin(120 *pi/180),0>
  0.70 * < cos(240 *pi/180),sin(240 *pi/180),0>
  0.70 * < cos(360 *pi/180),sin(360 *pi/180),0>

  // inner triangle
  0.35 * < cos(  0 *pi/180),sin(  0 *pi/180),0>
  0.35 * < cos(120 *pi/180),sin(120 *pi/180),0>
  0.35 * < cos(240 *pi/180),sin(240 *pi/180),0>
  0.35 * < cos(360 *pi/180),sin(360 *pi/180),0>
}

Note that the end points /should/ be identical. There are however some minor rounding differences, which mess up polygon computations. Compare with the following code, which leads to the desired results:

polygon { 8,
  // outer triangle
  0.70 * < cos(  0 *pi/180),sin(  0 *pi/180),0>
  0.70 * < cos(120 *pi/180),sin(120 *pi/180),0>
  0.70 * < cos(240 *pi/180),sin(240 *pi/180),0>
  0.70 * < cos(  0 *pi/180),sin(  0 *pi/180),0>

  // inner triangle
  0.35 * < cos(  0 *pi/180),sin(  0 *pi/180),0>
  0.35 * < cos(120 *pi/180),sin(120 *pi/180),0>
  0.35 * < cos(240 *pi/180),sin(240 *pi/180),0>
  0.35 * < cos(  0 *pi/180),sin(  0 *pi/180),0>
}

Code inspection shows that the polygon insideness testing code tests for precise equality of the points, whereas the general policy of POV-Ray is to accept slight rounding differences.

When POV-Ray 3.70 is run on a terminal, on an unix shell, and the user hits ctrl-Z to suspend (stop) POV-Ray, rather than stopping as expected, POV-Ray just reports that it did receive the signal, as if to laugh at the user “I’m not obeying your puny stop attempts”. It

The default action (as happens if the SIGTSTP signal is not trapped) would be much better, and is usually safe also in multithread programs.
It takes actual effort to _ignore_ the TSTP signal (namely, to trap that signal), so the current behavior is definitely a dysfeature, probably an oversight by whoever programmed the signal handler.

Also, when the terminal window is resized, POV-Ray needlessly reports that it received a signal number so-and-so (the number of SIGWINCH), adding irrelevant noise to its terminal output. Both signals (SIGTSTP and SIGWINCH) should simply be excluded from the signal trapping mask. I guess there are also other signals that are needlessly captured. It would be better to capture only those signals that an action is needed for.

I rendered attached .pov file with both 3.62 and 3.7RC1, and got different output between them.
In 3.7RC1, it looks like no_reflection option of the black sphere doesn’t work.

Adjusting the brightness of an image-mapped sky sphere, although not an uncommon task especially when using HDR light probes, currently is cumbersome at best, as it is not possible to specify a “finish { ambient ... }” statement.

To simplify tuning a sky sphere’s brightness, I suggest introducing a “brightness FLOAT” modifier (defaulting to 1.0) to either the sky_sphere block or (as a more versatile solution) the image_map statement.

It seems that the new area_illuminate flag for area lights does not take into account fade_power and fade_distance. The illumination falloff is still being calculated from the center of the light_source.

Here’s some relevant code:

camera{
  location<0,10,-10>
  look_at 0
}
plane{y,0 pigment{rgb 1}}
light_source{
  y*.1,100
  area_light x*10, z*1, 8, 8
  jitter
  area_illumination
  fade_power 2 fade_distance 1
}

A df3 file is written, with header 00 00 00 00 00 00 and no data (hypothetically valid df3 file).
This file is used as density file for media, using interpolation. This causes a crash once Pov-Ray starts rendering the pixels that contain media.
All pixels rendered before that render fine. Using no interpolation does not cause a crash.

Sample Scene:
#fopen out “random.df3” write
#write (out, uint16be <0,0,0>)
#fclose out

box{0,1 pigment{rgbt 1} hollow interior{media{
density{density_file df3 “random.df3” interpolate 1}}}} // interpolate 2 also crashes, interpolate 0 does not.

System: Win7 x64, 3.7 Beta 38

Hi,

I have a problem with photons. The following stripped down code simulates a
slide projector:

#include "colors.inc"

global_settings {
  #if (1)   // switch photons on/off
    photons { count 1000000 }
  #end
}

camera { location <0, 0, 200> sky<0,1,0> look_at <0,200,-200> angle 90 }

// projection screen
plane { z, -200 texture { pigment { White } finish{ diffuse 1 ambient 0.1} } }

// slide
polygon {
  5, <0,0,0>, <1,0,0>,<1,1,0>,<0,1,0>,<0,0,0>
  pigment { image_map {jpeg "s7_0.9_320.jpg" interpolate 2 filter all 1.0 } }
  translate <-0.5, 0.2, -0.3>
  photons { target refraction on reflection off collect off }
}

// projector lamp
light_source { <0, 0, 0>  color <1,1,1> }

——————————————-

A point light source projects through a image_map onto a screen.

Without photons the projected image is ok:
http://img838.imageshack.us/i/test4woph.png/

With photons the left and right bottom corners of the image will be clipped:
http://img101.imageshack.us/i/test4wph.png/

The size of clipped corners depends on the y-offset in the translate command.

The povray Version is:
Persistence of Vision™ Ray Tracer Version 3.6.1 (Debian (x86_64-linux-gnu-g+
+ 4.3.3 @ x86_64-pc-linux-gnu))
(the 3.7 beta has the same problem)

I posted this question in the general news group and got an answer by Christian Froeschlin,
who could reproduce the problem and suggested as workaround to divide the slide into small stripes

http://news.povray.org/povray.general/thread/%3Cweb.4c972bdffcc128eac947b6de0%40news.povray.org%3E/

This works, but doesn’t explain the problem.

Does anyone have an idea, whats wrong?

Many thanks,
Corvin

I used POV-Ray to make an animation of my Morgan driving around a slalom course. (If you are curious, you can see the output on youtube under my user name, nojonushi.) To make the long swooping fenders I used Mike William’s SweepSpline macro.

The code rendered the 1189 frames in one go with no problems. But the wheels in that animation do not rotate, so I then added code to rotate the wheels. In the calculations I added I used a #while loop to step through the spline containing the route coordinates and total up the distance traveled. Running POV-Ray on this file produced a random number of images and then issued an error, e.g.

 0:00:00 Processing Frame 456 of 1189
 0:00:00 Parsing

File: mogslalom.pov Line: 1918
Parse Warning: Patch objects not allowed in intersection.
File: mogslalom.pov Line: 2988
File Context (5 lines):

                object {
                SweepSpline(TFSpline,

Parse Error: Identifier expected, incomplete function call or spline call found instead.

Most of the parameters for the macro are missing. But this is after successfully generating, in this case, 455 images.

I have attached a text file with set-up and sample code that has given the error on two different machines.

Using interpolated image_maps in functions results in pixel-sized dot-artifacts when using the functions back into pigments.

This problem doesn’t shows using the same code on POV-Ray 3.6.

I qualified it as “low severity” because is not going to happen to most users: it will show only when using some advances techniques, for example when you want to decompose an image_map into the RGB components, perform operations, and mixing them back with an averaged pigment (example attached).

povray +Imesh_camera.pov +Omesh_camera.png +FN +W800 +H600 produces a “Failed to parse command-line option” error. when I rename my pov source file to ess_mesh_camera.pov it runs fine. seems to be pointing to a clash with the +im option. i also had another file that renaming it got me going.

The documentation says:

“-J Sets aa-jitter off”

However, it seems to have no effect. -J0 will turn off jittering.

Given the following two statements, a missing closing brace in the function declaration fn should throw a parse exception; instead it causes a memory access violation when trying to use fn in the second delcaration:

#local fn = function { 
  pigment { image_map { png "MultiPassBlobs3.png" gamma 1 map_type 0 once }} 
#local clr = fn(0,0,0);

.../scenes/objects/fractal2.pov

in global_settings  "max_trace" should be "max_trace_level"

.../scenes/advanced/diffuse_back.pov

in global_settings  assumed_gamma statement should not be followed by a semicolon

.../scenes/advanced/blocks/stackernight.pov

in global_settings  "assummed_gamma" should be spelled "assumed_gamma"

.../scenes/portfolio/*.pov

in all files other than _empty.pov the parse stops at the lines containing "[frame_number-1]" I'm guessing it should be "[frame_number]-1"  

original post on povray.beta-test:

POV-Ray 3.7.0.RC3 on Slackware 13.0 x86_64.
I pointed povray to use the calibri.ttf font over on my Windows 7 partition.
The result is garbled - strange letters with accents appear instead of the
expected text. (KDE's kfontview opens calibri.ttf OK, with nothing strange).

Pointing povray to use other fonts of Win7, e.g. comic.ttf and arial.ttf, was
OK.

I solved the problem by pushing calibri.ttf through fontforge and resaving it
as mycalibri.ttf.

Cheers,
Peter

Confirmed with development version on Windows XP x64.

Possibly a similar problem as  FS#162 .

original posting from povray.beta-test:

I get this error message:
"Parse Error: bad allocation  Render failed"
- after the code below has been running for about 3 seconds.

// ===== 1 ======= 2 ======= 3 ======= 4 ======= 5 ======= 6 ======= 7

#version 3.7;

#while (true)
  #local Fn = function { transform { translate <0, 0, 0> } }
  #undef Fn
#end // while

// ===== 1 ======= 2 ======= 3 ======= 4 ======= 5 ======= 6 ======= 7

I'm using POV-Ray for Windows - Version 3.7.0.RC3.msvc9-sse2.win32
The operating system is Windows XP.

With the code above, the error messages has so far appeared every time
right after 3318K tokens have been parsed. But with other versions of
my code, the error message does not always show up. (Sometimes the
render finishes and sometimes the parsing stops at different "times".)

[...]

Other users report no error message, but memory consumption rising to about 1.2 GB.

A scene of a hollow sphere viewed from the inside:

difference {
    sphere { 0, 100 }
    sphere { 0, 99 }
    pigment { rgb 1 }
    finish { ambient .4 }
}

global_settings {
    radiosity {
        error_bound .1
    }
}

Rendering produces dark splotches at the centers of the pretrace blocks, as shown in the attached image. Blocks rendered earlier have darker splotches. They also differ in shape between renders even with +HR (but not with +WT1).

Turning “always_sample” on, changing “pretrace_end” to 0.01, or increasing “count” past 1000 makes them imperceptibly faint (they can still be seen by increasing image contrast).

This is possibly a bug, as 3.6 doesn’t produce these artifacts regardless of additional settings.

povray.beta-test thread

In vfe/unix/unixoptions.cpp, -V is defined as a synonym for -​-version, overriding its general meaning of Verbose=off.

#macro A()
  #local foo = function { x }
  foo
#end

#local bar = A();

This causes either a segfault, corruption detected by malloc, or “Parse Error: Unknown user defined function”.

After some debugging I think this is what happens.

In source/backend/parser/parse.cpp, Parser::Parse_RValue is called to define the value of bar. Get_Token is called, which invokes A() and which ultimately returns foo as a FUNCT_ID_TOKEN. This token is handled by CASE_VECTOR in Parse_RValue. The relevant clause calls Parse_Unknown_Vector to parse additional tokens (e.g. “foo ( 1 )”). There aren’t any other tokens, but in the process of determining that, #end is reached and Return_From_Macro destroys the symbol table of A, including foo.

So by the time the CASE_VECTOR clause decides that foo is a function identifier that should be copied, the function is destroyed (both the function itself and its number in the symbol table). So here:

    Temp_Data  = (void *) Copy_Identifier((void *)*Token.DataPtr,*Token.NumberPtr);

if *Token.DataPtr (in this case, a function index) was already overwritten, we get “Unknown user defined function”; if it still has the valid function number, it increments the reference count of the function (which has already been freed) back from 0, and we get a double-free later.

A similar problem occurs when foo is a spline.

A tentative patch for the function case is attached.

in change #3319, csg got a new computation for its weighted textures.

But I’m confused by the computation of the weight: (circa end of csg.cpp file)

COLC weight = 1.0f / min(COLC(textures.size() - firstinserted), 1.0f);

I would have used a max() rather than a min().

It is transparent when there is only one texture, but:

• should there be no texture (an error...): it would be a division by 0
• should there be more than 1, the weight of each would be 1. which is without consequence UNLESS there is already some other textures in the list. The right value (from previous code) was 1/n

Or did I get a confusion about min() ?

min(0,1) == 0
min(4,1) == 1

Using max would protect against the division by 0 and the right value when multiple textures are used.

Any thought ?

UV-mapped textures for parametrics are broken in POV-Ray 3.70 RC3, in cases where two (or more) parametrics overlap in a scene.

In the following scene, note how the texture per se is always taken properly from whichever parametric is in front, while the UV coordinates are erroneously taken always from the red parametric where both overlap, no matter whether it is in front or back.

camera {
  location  <0.0, 1.5, -3.0>
  direction 1.5*z
  right     x*image_width/image_height
  look_at   0
}

light_source { <-30, 30, -30> color rgb 1 }

#declare Param = parametric {
  function { u*v*sin (15*v) },
  function { v },
  function { u*v*cos (15*v) }
  0, 1
  contained_by { box { -1,1 } }
  accuracy 0.002
  precompute 15 x,y,z
  rotate 180*x
  translate  <0.3,0.5,0>
}

object {
  Param
  uv_mapping
  texture {
    pigment {
      gradient x frequency 3
      color_map {
        [0 color red .5 ]
        [1 color red 1 ]
      }
    }
  }
}

object {
  Param
  uv_mapping
  texture {
    pigment {
      gradient x frequency 7
      color_map {
        [0 color green .5 ]
        [1 color green 1 ]
      }
    }
  }
  rotate y*180
}

POV-Ray 3.62 renders the scene properly.

As this bug has been found during code inspection, the uderlying cause has already been identified; I’m currently working on a fix.

Hello,

this bug report relates to this thread: http://news.povray.org/povray.beta-test/thread/%3Cweb.4e0064d9a3970d212b256d410%40news.povray.org%3E/

In /unix/unixoptions.cpp around line 817:

while ( !Stream.eof() )
{
	// get and preprocess line
	std::getline(Stream, line);
	line = pre_process_conf_line(line);
	++line_number;
	// skip empty line
	if(line.length() == 0)
		continue;
        [...]
}

`Stream.eof()` could never be true as well as `line.length()` always can be zero, leading to an endless loop. In my case, the problem occurred due to my ~/.povray/3.7/povray.conf being a directory instead of a file.

To fix the problem, one has to consolidate this loop by not only checking for eofbit, but also for failbit and badbit of `Stream`. The getline() method on a directory does not set the eofbit, but it sets fail and bad (test: http://codepad.org/RiZGo3ia). According to http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/iostream/ios/operatornot/ fail and bad can be checked for by `!Stream`. A simple `if (!Stream) break;` within the loop fixes the problem (patch file attached).

Are there more missing checks on iostreams like this in the code? :) They should definitely be fixed.

Furthermore, one could think about using the boost filesystem library to be able to distinguish files and directories to provide good error messages.

Hope that helps,

Jan-Philip Gehrcke

I tried to use 3.7 RC3. This was my first time with 3.7.

I got source, configured and compiled it and installed into Debian with checkinstall. And then I tried to use it. First run was with -benchmark (it took about 9 minutes, ok). Then I tried very simple scene:

rekcahx@oah:~/pov$ povray +Iaa.pov
povray: This is a RELEASE CANDIDATE version of POV-Ray. General distribution is discouraged.
Failed to parse command-line option

I tried to debug with strace:

rekcahx@oah:~/pov$ strace -o debug.strace povray +Iaa.pov
povray: This is a RELEASE CANDIDATE version of POV-Ray. General distribution is discouraged.
Persistence of Vision™ Ray Tracer Version 3.7.0.RC3 (g++ 4.6.1 @
x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu)
This is a release candidate of POV-Ray version 3.7.0.
General distribution is strongly discouraged.

POV-Ray is based on DKBTrace 2.12 by David K. Buck & Aaron A. Collins
Copyright 1991-2003 Persistence of Vision Team
Copyright 2003-2011 Persistence of Vision Raytracer Pty. Ltd.

Primary POV-Ray 3.7 Architects/Developers: (Alphabetically)

Chris Cason         Thorsten Froehlich  Christoph Lipka   

With Assistance From: (Alphabetically)

Nicolas Calimet     James Holsenback    Christoph Hormann   Nathan Kopp       
Juha Nieminen     

Past Contributors: (Alphabetically)

Steve Anger         Eric Barish         Dieter Bayer        David K. Buck     
Nicolas Calimet     Chris Cason         Aaron A. Collins    Chris Dailey      
Steve Demlow        Andreas Dilger      Alexander Enzmann   Dan Farmer        
Thorsten Froehlich  Mark Gordon         James Holsenback    Christoph Hormann 
Mike Hough          Chris Huff          Kari Kivisalo       Nathan Kopp       
Lutz Kretzschmar    Christoph Lipka     Jochen Lippert      Pascal Massimino  
Jim McElhiney       Douglas Muir        Juha Nieminen       Ron Parker        
Bill Pulver         Eduard Schwan       Wlodzimierz Skiba   Robert Skinner    
Yvo Smellenbergh    Zsolt Szalavari     Scott Taylor        Massimo Valentini 
Timothy Wegner      Drew Wells          Chris Young       

Other contributors are listed in the documentation.

Support libraries used by POV-Ray:

ZLib 1.2.3.4, Copyright 1995-1998 Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler
LibPNG 1.2.44, Copyright 1998-2002 Glenn Randers-Pehrson
LibJPEG 62, Copyright 1998 Thomas G. Lane
LibTIFF 3.9.5, Copyright 1988-1997 Sam Leffler, 1991-1997 SGI
Boost 1.46, http://www.boost.org/
OpenEXR, Copyright (c) 2004-2007, Industrial Light & Magic.

Parser Options

Input file: aa.pov
Remove bounds........On 
Split unions.........Off
Library paths:
  /usr/share/povray
  /usr/share/povray/ini
  /usr/share/povray/include
Clock value:    0.000  (Animation off)

Image Output Options

Image resolution.....320 by 240 (rows 1 to 240, columns 1 to 320).
Output file..........aa.png, 24 bpp PNG
Dithering............Off
Graphic display......Off
Mosaic preview.......Off
Continued trace......Off

Information Output Options

All Streams to console..........On 
Debug Stream to console.........On 
Fatal Stream to console.........On 
Render Stream to console........On 
Statistics Stream to console....On 
Warning Stream to console.......On 

[Parsing...]

Parse Time:       0 hours  0 minutes  0 seconds (0.001 seconds)
            using 1 thread(s) with 0.000 CPU-seconds total
Bounding Time:    0 hours  0 minutes  0 seconds (0.000 seconds)
            using 1 thread(s) with 0.000 CPU-seconds total

Quality:  9
Bounding boxes.......On   Bounding threshold: 3
Antialiasing.........Off

[Rendering...]

Photon Time:      No photons
Radiosity Time:   No radiosity
Trace Time:       0 hours  0 minutes  0 seconds (0.016 seconds)
            using 4 thread(s) with 0.036 CPU-seconds total

I/O restrictions:          disabled
X Window display:          enabled (using SDL)
Supported image formats:   gif tga iff ppm pgm hdr png jpeg tiff openexr
Unsupported image formats: -

Build architecture:  x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
Built/Optimized for: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu (using -march=native)
Compiler vendor:     gnu
Compiler version:    g++ 4.6.1
Compiler flags:      -pipe -Wno-multichar -Wno-write-strings -fno-enforce-eh-specs -s -O3 -ffast-math -march=native -pthread

Certain types of errors are being reported twice. For example:

Parse Error: Expected ‘numeric expression’, } found instead
Parse Error: Expected ‘object’, undeclared identifier ‘foo’

The first error was a user typo when not enough parameters were specified, and the later when calling a yet to be declared object.

During investigation it was also discovered that improperly formed scale statements also produced the double error report: <scale 1,0.5,1>

Verified on linux and windows platforms.

in the sample scenes, animations/raddem/raddem.ini is not parsable by current versions of povray. (3.7RC3 and upto #5476)

Radiosity= is a gone away option.(from a bit of time in the 3.7 branch)

According to the docs, the panoramic camera...

[...] uses a type of cylindrical projection to be able to use viewing angles larger than 180 degrees with a tolerable lateral-stretching distortion. The angle keyword is used to determine the viewing angle.

However, current implementation differs (and probably always has): The angle keyword has no effect, and the effective viewing angle is fixed to 180 degrees. Also note that this behaviour is identical to the spherical camera with angle 180,180, making the panoramic camera obsolete.

I propose to deprecate the “panoramic” keyword; should the keyword be encountered in a camera block, the code for the spherical camera should be used instead, except that the angle setting should be forced to 180,180; this should be accompanied by a parse warning.

The following SDL code causes a hard crash during parsing if _3024_dot_dat is undefined:

light_source {
    <0, 0, 0>
    color rgb 0.5*<1,0.905882,0.211765>
    fade_distance 500
    fade_power 1.6
    looks_like {_3024_dot_dat texture {
        pigment { rgbf <1,0.905882,0.211765,0.90> }
        finish { ambient 0.6 diffuse 0 phong 0.5 phong_size 40
            reflection 0.9
            refraction 1 ior 1.25
            }
        }
}    } 

The following scene reders differently with POV-Ray 3.7.0.RC3 than with POV-Ray 3.6.2:

camera
{
    right x*image_width/image_height
    location  <0, 0, -5>
    look_at   <0, 0, 0>
}

light_source
{
    <0,0,0>
    color rgb 1
    looks_like
    {
        box {
            <-1,-1,-0.1>, <1,1,0.1>
            pigment { wood }
            finish { ambient 5.0 diffuse 0 specular 0 phong 0 reflection 0 }
            scale 0.5
        }
    }
    translate <1,0,0>
}

plane
{
    <0, 1, 0>, -1
    texture
    {
        pigment { color rgb <0.5, 0.5, 0.55> }
        finish { specular 1.0 }
    }
}

See attachments for the output. As can be seen, POV-Ray 3.7 does translate the shape of the looks_like object along with the light source, but fails to translate the textures.

Using a facet pattern in a normal map results in a unspecified error in Evaluate_TPat at the render stage.
This probably should be caught at parse time to give a more descriptive error and a line number.

Example:

sphere {
  0, 1
  texture{
    pigment{rgb <1,1,1>}   
    normal {
      facets
      normal_map {
         [0 bumps ]
         [0.5 facets ]
         [1 bumps ]
      }
    } 
  }
}

~scenes/advanced/optics.pov not rendering correctly. See the post in povray.beta-test “Photons not working as expected” for additional information.

In POV-ray 3.7 beta 33 under Windows XP, the editor’s MRU list incorrectly handles files that have a comma in the pathname. Only the part of the name before the comma appears on the MRU list, but the rest of the name is left off.
Consequently, the file cannot be reopened via the MRU list. The file is also not reopened on launch if pov was closed with the file open. This also occurs in 3.6.1, I haven’t tried it under 3.6.2 yet.

Interestingly enough, a quick peek in the registry shows that both 3.6 and 3.7
are saving the entire path name correctly under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\POV-Ray\v3.6\POV-Edit\Recent (or \v3.7\POV-Edit\Recent).

This seems to be limited strictly to the editor’s MRU list. The file can still be opened normally using the open dialog box. Calling POV-ray from the command line and using a file or path name with commas in it works correctly. Included files with commas in the path work correctly, and the Tools→Edit last rendered file/View last rendered file work correctly also.

To duplicate, save a file with a comma in the pathname (either in the directory
name or the filename itself). Close the file, then attempt to reopen it using the MRU list in the file menu.

I/O Restriction defaults are not being properly set on a fresh install of POVWIN.

See this thread for more information.

As posted in povray.beta-test 2012-01-14 with the same subject.

OS Win7 32 bit

The following code fails with the following message:
Picture index out of range.
Picture index out of range.
Fatal error in renderer: Uncategorized error.
Render failed

The texture scale is relevant.

It does not fail in Pov 3.62
The image map can be downloaded from:
http://www.mmedia.is/~bjj/data/s_rings/sat_ring_color.png

(Attached)

#version 3.7;

global_settings {
adc_bailout 0.0039
ambient_light rgb <1.000,1.000,1.000>
assumed_gamma 1.00
irid_wavelength rgb <0.250,0.180,0.140>
max_trace_level 5
number_of_waves 10
noise_generator 3
charset ascii
}

background { colour rgb <0.000,0.000,0.000> }

#declare Ring_Texture1 =
texture {
uv_mapping
pigment {

image_map{
 png "sat_ring_color.png"
 interpolate 2
 map_type 0
}
rotate    <90.000,90.000,0.000>

}

finish {

ambient     rgb <0.100,0.100,0.100>
brilliance  1.000
crand       0.000
diffuse     0.600
metallic    0.000
phong       0.000
phong_size  40.000
specular    0.000
roughness   0.050

}

}

#declare Camera0 =
camera {
perspective
location <3843.816,38.892,-2660.667>
up y
right 1.333*x
angle 33.000
sky ←0.004,1.000,0.002>
look_at < 0.449, 18.943, 0.102 >
} end Camera0 disc { Disc0
0,y,4.400000,2.500000
texture{ Ring_Texture1 }

  scale     <750.000000,750.000000,750.000000>      // Fails 32 bit

scale <800.000000,800.000000,800.000000> Fails 64 bit
scale <600.000000,600.000000,600.000000> does not fail
rotate <0.000000,0.000000,-20.000000>
translate ←3500.000000,900.000000,900.000000>
} end Disc0 camera{ Camera0 } ///

The +GD flag gives me an “Invalid parameter” error, whether on the command line or in a .ini file.

Debug_File= still works.

I reported this in povray.beta-test, but did not receive a response.

The problem occurs in both Windows 7 and in Linux.

Consider the following script:

  #fopen F "foo.txt" read
  #read (F, Foo)
  #debug concat ("'", Foo, "'\n")
  #fclose F

Now assume that foo.txt erroneously contains unquoted text (which will result in a parse error):

  Blah

When the error is reported, POV-Ray for Windows will helpfully open foo.txt, but any attempt to save a corrected version of foo.txt will fail until you exit the POV-Ray GUI, presumably because foo.txt is not properly closed by the parser.

Turns out the crand feature, which depends on a real random number generator (and hence has threading issues) was disabled early on during 3.7 development, and hasn’t been fixed yet. The code is commented out in line 2426/2427 of trace.cpp.

POV-Ray fails to accept UTF-8 encoded files with a leading Byte Order Mark.

According to the code it was intended to recognize a leading BOM (or, more precisely, leading non-ASCII code sequences) and automatically switch to UTF-8, so this must be considered a bug rather than a missing feature.

How to reproduce:

# An empty directory, an empty source file.
$ mkdir test && cd test && touch test.pov
# Generate the first 24 frames.
$ povray -D +KFF24 +Itest.pov +Otest.png
# Try to generate the 25th frame.
# `25' after `+KFF' can be changed to any integer greater than 24.
$ povray -D +C +KFF25 +Itest.pov +Otest.png

What happens:

==== [Parsing...] ==========================================================
Possible Parse Error: Cannot find file 'test.pov', even after trying to append
 file type extension.
Parse Error: Cannot open input file.
Fatal error in parser: Cannot parse input.
Render failed

OS: Gentoo AMD64 unstable
POV-Ray version: 3.7.0 rc5

Using POV-Ray 3.7 RC6 64bit for Windows
I have problems in the POV-Ray editor with ‘backspace’:

When using backspace at start of line
it does not only kill the return/line feed, but also
everything of the line what’s beneath the upper line.

Sample: (here ‘|’ is used for the current cursor position!)

//--------------------------------------
texture { pigment{ Red }
|         normal { bumps 0.5 scale 0.1 }
//--------------------------------------

hitting backspace results in:

//--------------------------------------
texture { pigment{ Red }| 0.5 scale 0.1 }
//--------------------------------------

and not as expected:

//--------------------------------------
texture { pigment{ Red }|         normal { bumps 0.5 scale 0.1 }
//--------------------------------------

With 3.6.2 and with RC3 (latest old beta I found on my computers)
this was no problem!

I already reported this on 17-Sept-2012 at
http://news.povray.org/povray.beta-test/thread/%3C5056f452%241%40news.povray.org%3E/

Quoted strings as parameters to command-line options work on the command line but not in INI files; e.g.:

+i"test.pov"

Root cause has already been identified (actually the problem was found during code inspection) and a fix is under way.

Recently, I have been rendering an animation with POV-Ray 3.7 RC 6 using radiosity, photons and backside illumination. Many frames contained artefacts like in the attached image file. Trying to eliminate those artefacts I observed the following:

• Rendering the same frame several times did not reproduce the artefacts or reproduced them differently. I.e., when I rendered a second (third, fourth, ...) time with +SF100 +EF100, the black space in the image was somewhere else or in some cases disappeared.
• With radiosity turned off, no such artefacts have happened since, even in the scenes where they happened with radiosity turned on.
• Turning off photons with radiosity still turned on did not remove the artefacts.
• Rendering with one thread on one CPU core instead of two threads on two cores did not change anything except the rendering time.
• Changing the radiosity settings I have not tried thoroughly, but at least raising or lowering count or error_bound does not seem to have any effect on this.

While POV-Ray was rendering, no other memory-intensive or CPU-intensive programs were running and POV-Ray itself did not report any error (just the usual warnings that some of the used features could change in future versions etc.). Render priotity was set to “high”.

Subsurface scattering must be made radiosity-aware.

The function of the “Debug_File=” .ini option has changed from 3.6 to 3.7.37a.
In 3.6, when rendering multiple frames, a debug file would be created that then appended the debug lines for each frame into the file. It was therefore able to have debug data that identified what parameters were used in which frame in case a frame did not have the desired effect.

In 3.7.37a, the debug file does not perform this function. Instead it creates a new debug file (overwriting the prior) with each new frame. Therefore the debug data is only useful for the final frame (or wherever the render was halted). This is useful for a single frame render or for identifying a fault within a series of frames (because only the last one will remain) but it is not useful for many frames that render successfully.

This problem does not cause any rendering errors or other defects. The debug file specified will only contain the debug data for the last frame rendered.

Per discussion in the forum it was unknown if this was a bug or “feature”. At this time it is causing me a problem so I am submitting the bug. No related bugs were found searching for “output” or “debug” in any status.

Operating System in use is Windows XP. I cannot test 3.7.37a in additional OSes, but it does not seem like it would be OS-specific.

Many programming languages support an indeterminate number of parameters in functions/macros.

JavaScript for instance supports an “arguments” object.

Lua for instance supports the “args” object.

I would like to see that added to POV as well.

Here’s an JavaScript example:

function ArgTest(a, b){
   var i, s = "The ArgTest function expected ";
   var numargs = arguments.length;     //Get number of arguments passed.
   var expargs = ArgTest.length;       //Get number of arguments expected.
   if (expargs < 2)
      s += expargs + " argument. ";
   else
      s += expargs + " arguments. ";
   if (numargs < 2)
      s += numargs + " was passed.";
   else
      s += numargs + " were passed.";
   s += "\n\n"
   for (i =0 ; i < numargs; i++){      //Get argument contents.
   s += "  Arg " + i + " = " + arguments[i] + "\n";
   }
   return(s);                          //Return list of arguments.
}