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98 | Refactoring/Cleanup | Unimp. Feature/TODO | 3.70 beta 36 | Defer | Medium | Refactor Windows UI code for Unicode support | Tracked on GitHub | |
Future release |
Task Description
Windows UI code should be refactored to use _TCHAR throughout instead of char, as well as the corresponding string function macros, to head for Unicode support.
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296 | Geometric Primitives | Definite Bug | 3.70 RC7 | Defer | Medium | max gradient computation is not thread safe (isosurface... | Tracked on GitHub | |
3.71 release |
Task Description
It appears as a side effect of investigation of #294: the code in isosurf.cpp, inside bool IsoSurface::Function_Find_Root_R(ISO_ThreadData& itd, const ISO_Pair* EP1, const ISO_Pair* EP2, DBL dt, DBL t21, DBL len, DBL& maxg)
if(gradient < temp)
gradient = temp;
is not thread-safe (The code is used at render time, there is a data race between < and = operation, as gradient is stored in the global object and accessed in write mode by the cited code)
It is only important if the gradient is initially undervaluated (otherwise, all is fine, no write-access)
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6 | Subsurface Scattering | Unimp. Feature/TODO | 3.70 beta 32 | Defer | Low | Integrate Subsurface Scattering with Photons | Tracked on GitHub | |
Future release |
Task Description
Subsurface scattering must be made photon-aware.
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8 | Radiosity | Unimp. Feature/TODO | 3.70 beta 32 | Defer | Low | Improve Radiosity "Cross-Talk" Rejection in Corners | Tracked on GitHub | |
Future release |
Task Description
Near concave edges, radiosity samples may be re-used at a longer distance away from the edge than towards the edge; there is code in place to ensure this, but it only works properly where two surfaces meet roughly rectangularly, while failing near the junction of three surfaces or non-rectangular edges, potentially causing “cross-talk”.
It should be investigated how the algorithm can be improved or replaced to better cope with non-trivial geometry.
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25 | Animation | Definite Bug | 3.70 beta 32 | Defer | Low | Pause sometimes fails when rendering animation | Tracked on GitHub | |
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Task Description
There is an issue where the pause button in POVWIN will sometimes not work during an animation (primarily where the frame rate is high), and furthermore, POVWIN can then get into a state where it’s not possible to use the pause until it is re-started.
Newsgroup report.
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58 | Parser/SDL | Unimp. Feature/TODO | 3.70 beta 32 | Defer | Low | allow SDL code to detect optional features | Tracked on GitHub | |
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Task Description
Some features are optional in custom builds of POV-Ray (I’m thinking about OpenEXR in particular); it would be nice to have a syntax for an SDL script to check for support of such features, so it may take some fallback action if the feature is not supported.
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66 | Texture/Material/Finish | Feature Request | 3.62 | Defer | Low | checker and cells pattern are slightly off-center | Closed | |
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Task Description
In POV-Ray 3.6 (including 3.62), checker and cells patterns are off by 0.001 (1e-3) units, as can be demonstrated with this scene:
camera {
location <0.0, 0.0, -5.0>
direction 1.5*z
right x*image_width/image_height
look_at <0.0, 0.0, 0.0>
}
box { <-1,-1,0>, <0,0,1> pigment { checker color rgb 1 color rgb 0 scale 0.2 translate <-0.5,-0.5,0> } finish { ambient 1 diffuse 0 } }
box { < 1, 1,0>, <0,0,1> pigment { checker color rgb 1 color rgb 0 scale 0.2 translate < 0.5, 0.5,0> } finish { ambient 1 diffuse 0 } }
box { < 1,-1,0>, <0,0,1> pigment { checker color rgb 1 color rgb 0 scale 200.0 translate < 0.5,-0.5,0> } finish { ambient 1 diffuse 0 } }
box { <-1, 1,0>, <0,0,1> pigment { checker color rgb 1 color rgb 0 scale 200.0 translate <-0.5, 0.5,0> } finish { ambient 1 diffuse 0 } }
The same can be demonstrated for the cells pattern.
POV-Ray 3.7 beta 34 is “clean”.
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85 | Other | Feature Request | Not applicable | Defer | Low | Aspect ratio issues | Tracked on GitHub | |
Future release |
Task Description
Background
When rendering an image, there are actually three aspect ratios involved:
1) The aspect ratio of the camera, set with the up and right vectors.
2) The aspect ratio of the rendered image, set with the +W and +H parameters.
3) The aspect ratio of the pixels in the intended target medium. While this is very often 1:1, it’s definitely not always so (anamorphic images are common in some media, such as DVDs).
The aspect ratio of the camera does not (and arguably should not, although some people might disagree) define the aspect ratio of the image resolution, but the aspect ratio of the image as shown on the final medium. In other words, it defines how the image should be displayed, not what the resolution of the image should be.
This of course means that the aspect ratio of the target medium pixels has to be taken into account when specifying the image resolution. If the target medium pixels are not 1:1 (eg. when rendering for a medium with non-square pixels, or when rendering an anamorphic image eg. for a DVD), the proper resolution has to be specified so that the aspect ratio of the displayed image remains the same as the one specified in the camera block.
This isn’t generally a problem. It usually goes like “my screen is physically 4:3, so I design my scene for that aspect ratio, but the resolution of my screen is mxn which is not 4:3, but that doesn’t matter; I just render with +Wm +Hn and I get a correct image for my screen”.
However, problems start when someone renders an image using an image aspect ratio / pixel aspect ratio combination which does not match the camera aspect ratio. By far the most common situation is rendering a scene with a 4:3 camera for a screen with square pixels but with a non-4:3 resolution (most typically 16:9 or 16:10 nowadays). The image will be horizontally stretched.
In a few cases the effect is the reverse: The scene (and thus the camera) has been designed for some less-typical aspect ratio, eg. a cinematic 2.4:1 aspect ratio, but then someone renders the image with a 4:3 resolution. The resulting image will be horizontally squeezed.
In a few cases this is actually the correct and desired behavior, ie. when you are really rendering the image in an anamorphic format (eg. for a DVD). However, often it’s an inadverted mistake.
Some people argue that this default behavior should be changed. However, there are also good arguments why it should not be changed. Some argue that POV-Ray should have more features (at the SDL level, at the command-line level or both) to control this behavior.
There are several possible situations, which is why this issue is so complicated. These situations may include:
- The scene author doesn’t really care what aspect ratio is used to render the image, even if it means that additional parts of the scenery become visible or parts are cropped away when using a different aspect ratio than what he used.
In this case the choice of camera aspect ratio should be up to the person who renders the image, and thus selectable on the command-line. However, he should have an easy choice of how changing the aspect ratio affects the image: Should it extend the viewing range, or should it crop part of it, compared to the original?
And this, of course, while still making it possible to render for an anamorphic format.
- The author wants to support different aspect ratios, but he wants to control precisely how it affects the composition of the image. Maybe he never wants anything cropped away within certain limits, but instead the image should always be extended in whichever direction is necessary due to the aspect ratio. Or maybe he wants to allow cropping the image, but only up to a certain point. Or whatever.
In this case the choice of camera aspect ratio should be up to the author, and thus selectable in the scene file, while still allowing some changes from the command-line.
- The author designed his scene for a precise aspect ratio and nothing else, and doesn’t want the image to be rendered in any other aspect ratio. Maybe he used some very peculiar aspect ratio (eg. something like 1:2, ie. twice as tall as wide) for artistic composition reasons, and wants the image rendered with that aspect ratio, period.
Perhaps the author should be able to completely forbid the change of camera aspect ratio in the command-line.
Of course anamorphic rendering should still be supported for targets with a different pixel aspect ratio.
Possible solution
This solution does not necessarily address all the problems described above perfectly, but could be a good starting point for more ideas:
Add a way to specify in the camera block minimum and maximum limits for the horizontal and vertical viewing angles (and if any of them is unspecified, it’s unlimited). Of course for this to be useful in any way, there should also be a way to change the camera and pixel aspect ratios from the command line.
The idea with this is that the author of the scene can use these angle limits to define a rectangular “protected zone” at the center of the view, using the minimum angle limits. In other words, no matter how the camera aspect ratio is modified, the horizontal and/or vertical viewing angles will never get smaller than these minimum angles. This ensures that the image will never be cropped beyond a certain limit, only extended either horizontally or vertically to ensure that the “protected zone” always remains fully visible regardless of what aspect ratio is used.
The maximum angles can be used for the reverse: They ensure that no scenery beyond a certain point will ever become visible, no matter what aspect ratio is used. This can be used to make sure that unmodelled parts of the scene never come into view. Thus the image will always be cropped to ensure this, depending on the aspect ratio.
I’m not completely sure what should be done if both minimum and maximum angles are specified, and the user specifies an aspect ratio which would break these limits. An error message could be a possibility. At least it would be a way for the author to make sure his scene is never rendered using an aspect ratio he doesn’t want. He can use these angle limits to give some leeway how much the aspect ratio can change, to an extent, or he could even force a specific aspect ratio and nothing else (by specifying that both the minimum and maximum angles are the same).
So in short:
- Add a “minimum/maximum horizontal/vertical angles” feature to the camera block. These can be used to define a “protected zone” in the image which must not be breached by command-line options.
- Add a command-line syntax to change the camera aspect ratio (which automatically obeys the “protected zone” settings). Could perhaps give an error message if the command-line options break the limits in the scene camera.
- Add a command-line syntax to specify a pixel aspect ratio other than 1:1. This can be used to render anamorphic versions of the image on purpose (iow. not by mistake).
This can probably be made backwards-compatible in that if none of these new features are used, the behavior could be the same as currently (or at least similar).
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91 | Texture/Material/Finish | Feature Request | 3.70 beta 36 | Defer | Low | Slope pattern applied to object is not transformed afte... | Tracked on GitHub | |
Future release |
Task Description
There is an big issue with the slope pattern: when the object it is applied to is instanced (again) with a transformation (in particular a rotation, as a translation would not impact.. but a shear might), the colours of the surfaces are changed.
object { p translate -5*x }
object { p rotate 220*y+20*x translate 3*x }
Nobody would expect the object to be different in appearance. If slope {} is replaced with wood, all is fine. (as for others textures, i guess)
IMHO, the slope vector need to be adjusted for the later transformation(s) (so as to compensate the issue of using the Perturbed Normal vector).
This should not impact the AOI/FACING (experimental) patterns, as AOI definition is pretty clear about duplicating & transform if you think about it a bit, as well as FACING: for these two, it is expected to either use the ray(current point of view) or a fixed 3D point as reference. At the limit, discussion about moving the 3D point of FACING might also be opened to interpretation.
AOI/FACING are in task #19
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243 | Geometric Primitives | Unimp. Feature/TODO | All | Defer | Low | Sphere sweep behaves wrong when scaled | Tracked on GitHub | |
Future release |
Task Description
The sphere_sweep renders well when specified directly, but when it is scaled, its bounding box is calculated incorrectly, which clips the object so it almost disappears.
The effect is present for all three types of splines.
I’m attaching a test scene and the rendering result. The saving of the object with #declare has no effect, I just wanted to show both transformed and untransformed version.
I don’t think this issue is related to other artifacts occuring with sphere_sweep, as it is obviously an issue of the internal bounding box.
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245 | Other | Feature Request | All | Defer | Low | POVMS message queue can fill up with GB of data for ver... | Tracked on GitHub | |
Future release |
Task Description
With very fast renders and very large output files, the message queue can fill up because the producers are not limited by IO, while the consumer performance is limited by disk IO. Consequently, the message queue can fill up to exhaust all available memory. The solution is to build in some better control of pending output data in the message queue on the producer side. This will also pave the way for message communication over slow links (i.e. a network).
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264 | Photons | Unimp. Feature/TODO | 3.70 RC6 | Defer | Low | Improve precision of photon direction information | Tracked on GitHub | |
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Task Description
In the photons map, the direction of each photon is stored as separate latitude & longitude angles (encoded in one byte each), causing the longitudinal direction component’s precision to be unnecessarily high for directions close to the “poles” (Y axis); in addition, encoded value -128 is never used. For better overall precision as well as precision homogenity, the following scheme could be used instead:
latCode = (int)((LatCount-1) * (lat/M_PI + 0.5) + 0.5)
For each latitude code, define a specific number of encodable longitude values, LngCount[latCode] = approx. cos(lat)*pi*65536/(2*LatCount); this can be a pre-computed table, and may need slight tweaking for optimum use of the code space. Encode the longitude (-pi to +pi) into a value from 0 to (LngCount[lat]-1) using
LC = LngCount[latCode];
lngCode = (int)(LC * (lng/(2*M_PI) + 0.5) + 0.5) % LC;
dirCode = LatBase[latCode] + lngCode;
For decoding, a simple lookup from a precomputed list of directions could be used (2^15 entries, i.e. one hemisphere, will suffice). To conserve space, direction vectors could be scaled by (2^N-1) and stored as (N+1)-bit signed integer triples rather than floating point values; due to the limited precision of the lat/long information, 8 bits per coordinate might be enough, giving a table size of 96k. A full double-precision table would require 786k instead.
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271 | Texture/Material/Finish | Definite Bug | 3.70 RC6 | Defer | Low | filter affects object's own brightness in an improper w ... | Closed | |
3.70 release |
Task Description
The following scene has four spheres with different pigment color & filter settings:
- Left: filter 1 - Right: filter 0
- Top: red 0.0 green 0.5 blue 1.0 - Bottom: red 0.00 green 0.05 blue 0.10 (10% of the above)
Background is set to black, so that we only see the diffuse component of the object’s effective color.
Theoretically, both left spheres should be invisible, as they are fully transmissive (with a filtering effect), but apparently with a high filter setting, reducing an object’s pigment color actually increases the object’s effective diffuse color.
//+w600 +h600
global_settings{ assumed_gamma 1.0 }
camera {
orthographic
location <0,0,-10>
right 4*x
up 4*y
look_at <0,0,0>
}
light_source{<10,10,-10> color rgb 1 parallel }
background { color rgb 0 }
default {
finish {
ambient 0
diffuse 1
specular 0
phong 0
reflection { 0.0 }
}
}
sphere { <-1, 1, 0>, 0.8 texture { pigment { color rgb <0,0.5,1.0> filter 1.0 } } }
sphere { < 1, 1, 0>, 0.8 texture { pigment { color rgb <0,0.5,1.0> filter 0.0 } } }
sphere { <-1,-1, 0>, 0.8 texture { pigment { color rgb <0,0.5,1.0>*0.1 filter 1.0 } } }
sphere { < 1,-1, 0>, 0.8 texture { pigment { color rgb <0,0.5,1.0>*0.1 filter 0.0 } } }
This bug has been around in 3.6 already.
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281 | Geometric Primitives | Feature Request | 3.70 RC7 | Defer | Low | Bug in rendering of Bézier patches | Tracked on GitHub | |
Future release |
Task Description
In version 3.7.0.RC7.msvc10.win64, there is a bug in rendering Bézier patches in which four points (along one edge) are all the same point.
The rendering can be seen here: http://i.imgur.com/eq2UIXR.png [Edit: See attachment for the rendering]
As you can see, there is a visible unwanted artifact in the corner of each patch. The two patches shown are essentially the same, except with the 4×4 matrix of vertices transposed (just to demonstrate that simply transposing it didn’t fix it).
Expected rendering is a smooth surface without the artifact.
Below is the code used to render the above example.
#version 3.7;
global_settings { assumed_gamma 1.0 }
camera {
location <45, 31, -10>
look_at <40, 21, 200>
right x*image_width/image_height
}
light_source {
<660, 300, -525>
color rgb 1
}
Example 1: First point in each row is the same point bicubic_patch { type 1 flatness 0.001 u_steps 4 v_steps 4 <32.2168, -23.78125, 0>, <34.4968, -23.78125, 0>, <35.2168, -23.78125, -0.72>, <35.2168, -23.78125, -3>, <32.2168, -23.78125, 0>, <34.4968, -22.10256, 0>, <35.2168, -21.57244, -0.72>, <35.2168, -21.57244, -3>, <32.2168, -23.78125, 0>, <33.9709, -21.55577, 0>, <34.52483, -20.85299, -0.72>, <34.52483, -20.85299, -3>, <32.2168, -23.78125, 0>, <32.30556, -21.50298, 0>, <32.33359, -20.78352, -0.72>, <32.33359, -20.78352, -3> rotate 180*x
scale 1.4 translate ←5, 0, 0> pigment { color <1, 0, 0> } }
Example 2: First row is all the same point bicubic_patch {
type 1 flatness 0.001
u_steps 4 v_steps 4
<32.2168, -23.78125, 0>, <32.2168, -23.78125, 0>, <32.2168, -23.78125, 0>, <32.2168, -23.78125, 0>,
<34.4968, -23.78125, 0>, <34.4968, -22.10256, 0>, <33.9709, -21.55577, 0>, <32.30556, -21.50298, 0>,
<35.2168, -23.78125, -0.72>, <35.2168, -21.57244, -0.72>, <34.52483, -20.85299, -0.72>, <32.33359, -20.78352, -0.72>,
<35.2168, -23.78125, -3>, <35.2168, -21.57244, -3>, <34.52483, -20.85299, -3>, <32.33359, -20.78352, -3>
rotate 180*x
scale 1.4
pigment { color <1, 1, 0> }
}
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282 | Image format | Feature Request | Not applicable | Defer | Low | Unrendered region should be transparent, not black | Tracked on GitHub | |
Future release |
Task Description
When rendering only a region of a file, using the command-line options +sc/+sr/+ec/+er, the area of the image that is excluded comes out as black in the final PNG.
Expected behaviour is for it to be transparent.
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30 | Parser/SDL | Feature Request | Not applicable | Defer | Very Low | Custom progress information during parsing | Closed | |
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Task Description
For some particularly “heavy” SDL scripts, it might be desirable to override (or complement) the standard “Parsing 47110815K tokens” progress information with some more helpful custom info, e.g. “Planting trees... (37%)”, or “Generating terrain mesh row 47 of 500”.
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84 | Parser/SDL | Feature Request | Not applicable | Defer | Very Low | A for-loop construct | Closed | |
3.70 beta 37 |
Task Description
Many people clearly miss a simple for-loop construct in povray. It is indeed true that probably at least 99% of #while loops out there have the form of a simple for-loop. It’s much rarer to have to use more exotic forms of looping supported by the #while mechanism. Thus it would make sense if a #for construct would be added which would make writing such loops much easier and convenient.
The only remaining question would be the syntax.
IMO the for-loop construct should implicitly declare a local variable of a specified name, automatically increment it during the loop, and then undefine it after the loop ends. It could perhaps be something along the lines of:
#for(<identifier name>, <initial value>, <final value> [, <step>])
<loop body>
#end
Example:
#for(Counter, 1, 10) // 'Counter' gets values 1, 2, 3, ..., 10
#debug concat(str(Counter, 0, 0), "\n")
#end
#for(Counter, 1, 10, 3) // 'Counter' gets values 1, 4, 7, 10
#debug concat(str(Counter, 0, 0), "\n")
#end
I think this syntax ought to be relatively easy to implement (compared to more “traditional” syntaxes, such as something like “for Counter = 1 to 10” or the C syntax, which would be a lot more complicated).
Of course this raises a couple of questions:
1) What happens if ‘Counter’ was already declared as an identifier? One of three possibilities comes to mind:
2) Should the user be able to modify the counter variable from inside the body of the loop? Something like this comes to mind as viable:
// Prints the values 1, 2, 3, 9 and 10
#for(Counter, 1, 10)
#debug concat(str(Counter, 0, 0), "\n")
#if(Counter = 3) #local Counter = 8; #end
#end
Alternatively the counter variable could be read-only.
Additionally, it could be nice if #break could be used to immediately jump out of the current loop (either #while or #for).
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86 | Parser/SDL | Feature Request | Not applicable | Defer | Very Low | Add support for more RNG types | Tracked on GitHub | |
Future release |
Task Description
The current 32-bit linear congruential generator used as RNG in POV-Ray is sometimes quite limited for some purposes and in a few cases its poor quality shows up (as has been demonstrated more than once in the newsgroup). Thus it would be nice if POV-Ray offered additional, higher-quality random number generators, besides the current one (which should probably remain for backwards compatibility). These RNGs could include algorithms like the Mersenne Twister and the ISAAC RNG, both of which have very decent quality and have an enormous periods (while at the same time being very fast).
After a long discussion, the following syntax for specifying the RNG type and seed (which may be larger than 32 bits) has been suggested:
seed(<value>) | seed(<type>, <value> [, <values>])
For example:
#declare Seed1 = seed(123); // Use the current RNG, with seed 123
#declare Seed2 = seed(1, 123); // Identical to the previous one
#declare Seed3 = seed(2, 456, 789, 123); // Use RNG algorithm #2,
// with a large seed (96 bits specified here)
A C++ implementation of the ISAAC RNG can be found at http://warp.povusers.org/IsaacRand.zip
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87 | Geometric Primitives | Feature Request | Not applicable | Defer | Very Low | Add new feature: Reference object | Tracked on GitHub | |
Future release |
Task Description
When you instantiate an object several times, eg:
object { MyObj translate -x*10 }
object { MyObj translate x*10 }
POV-Ray will copy that object in memory, at least for most types of objects. Not for all of them, though. Most famously if MyObj is a mesh, it won’t be copied, but only a reference to the original will be used, thus saving memory. (There are a few other primitives which also don’t cause a copy, such as bicubic_patch and blob, but those are naturally not so popular as mesh, so it’s a less known fact.)
AFAIK the reason why referencing (rather than copying) is not used for all types of objects is rather complicated, and mostly related to how transformations are applied to these objects. For example if the object being instantiated is a union, the translates above will be (AFAIK) applied to the individual members of the union rather than to the union object itself.
Copying, however, can be quite detrimental in some situations. For example if you have a huge union, and you want to instantiate it many times, the memory usage will be that many times larger (compared to just one instance). This is sometimes something which the user would not want, even if it made the rendering slightly slower as a consequence. (In other words, better to be able to render the scene in the first place, rather than running out of memory.)
Redesigning POV-Ray so that all objects would be referenced rather than copied would probably be a huge job, and in some cases a questionable one. There probably are situations where the current method really produces faster rendering times, so redesigning POV-Ray so that it would always reference instead of copy, could make some scenes render slower.
So this got me thinking about an alternative approach: How hard would it be to create a special object which sole purpose is to act as a reference to another object, without copying it? This special reference object would act as any regular object, would have its own transformation matrix and all that data related to objects, but its sole purpose is to simply be a “wrapper” which references an existing object. It could be, for example, like this:
object_ref { MyObj translate -x*10 }
object_ref { MyObj translate x*10 }
The end result would be exactly identical as earlier, but the difference is that now MyObj behaves in the same way as a mesh (in the sense that it’s not instantiated twice, but only once, even though it appears twice in the scene), regardless of what MyObj is.
In some cases this might render slightly slower than the first version (because POV-Ray has to apply the transformations of the object_ref first, after which it applies whatever transformations are inside MyObj), but that’s not the point here. The point is to save memory if MyObj is large.
An object_ref would behave like any other object, so you could do things like:
#declare MyObjRef = object_ref { MyObj };
object { MyObjRef translate -x*10 }
object { MyObjRef translate x*10 }
(The only thing being instantiated (and copied) here is the “MyObjRef” object, not the object it’s referring to, so that actual object is still stored in memory only once.)
In some situations it might even be so that referenced objects actually render faster than if the objects were copied because references increase data locality, lessening cache misses.
I believe this could be a rather useful feature and should be seriously considered, unless there are some major obstacles in implementing it.
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99 | Refactoring/Cleanup | Unimp. Feature/TODO | 3.70 beta 36 | Defer | Very Low | Refactor engine (front- & back-end) code for Unicode su... | Tracked on GitHub | |
Future release |
Task Description
Front- & Back-end code should be refactored for full Unicode support in scene files and strings.
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109 | Other | Compatibility Issue | 3.70 beta 37a | Defer | Very Low | Debug_File No Longer Appends Frame by Frame Debug Data | Closed | |
Future release |
Task Description
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.
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124 | Parser/SDL | Feature Request | 3.70 beta 37a | Defer | Very Low | variable number of parameters in macros | Closed | |
Future release |
Task Description
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.
}
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129 | Parser/SDL | Feature Request | 3.70 beta 37a | Defer | Very Low | Hash arrays | Tracked on GitHub | |
Future release |
Task Description
Currently, array items may only be referenced by their index number (an integer). It would be nice to also be able to assign string values as array indexes, as in other scripting languages.
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133 | Geometric Primitives | Feature Request | 3.70 beta 37a | Defer | Very Low | Subdivision support | Tracked on GitHub | |
Future release |
Task Description
Someone built a version of Povray with internal support for automatic subdivision of meshes. See:
http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~xwu/Pov-Sub/
Would like to see this feature added natively to Povray.
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136 | Parser/SDL | Feature Request | 3.70 beta 37a | Defer | Very Low | String concatenation operator | Closed | |
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Task Description
Using the concat function is tedious. Why not just have an operator with which to concatenate strings?
“Hello " + “world!”
“Hello " . “world!”
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237 | User interface | Definite Bug | 3.70 RC3 | Defer | Very Low | Glitch in displaying rendered pixels and percentage | Tracked on GitHub | |
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Task Description
When rendering in multiple passes (radiosity in my case), the elapsed pixels and percentage, written to terminal are first displayed like this: Rendered 126202 of 360000 pixels (35%) Then on the second stage the output text becomes shorter and you see Rendered 25344 of 360000 pixels (7%)%) The contents of the previous status are not erased, so the longer text persists (note the duplicate percentage sign and closing parenthesis). Such a glitch could have more drastic effect in rare cases.
I’m running Version 3.7.0.RC3 (g++ 4.6.2 x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu) compiled for the Arch Linux package.
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242 | Other | Feature Request | All | Defer | Very Low | Algorithm to fix the so-called shadow line artifact | Tracked on GitHub | |
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Task Description
The so-called shadow line artifact (http://wiki.povray.org/content/Knowledgebase:The_Shadow_Line_Artifact) which affects objects with a ‘normal’ statement as well as smooth meshes and heightfields can be really annoying sometimes. Currently the only way to remove it is to make the object shadowless, which isn’t a good solution except in very special cases.
This algorithm could remove the artifact: If the actual normal vector of the object points away from the light source (its dot-product with the light vector is negative) but the perturbed normal points towards it (dot-product positive), then ignore the first shadow-test intersection with the object itself.
There are alternative ways of implementing an equivalent functionality:
- Don’t check the condition (if it’s too difficult to check due to how the code is designed) but always ignore the first intersection with the objects itself. This will work properly with closed surfaces but not with open ones, so it might need to be a feature for the user to turn on with a keyword (similar to eg. ‘double_illuminate’).
- Alternatively, don’t ignore the first intersection, but instead ignore the “opposite side” of the object’s surface (again, possibly only if a keyword has been specified). In other words, if we are rendering the outer side of the object, ignore its inner side when shadow-testing, and vice-versa.
- Perhaps simply add a feature to make surfaces one-sided (similarly to how they can be made so in OpenGL and similar scanline rendering systems). In other words, the inner side of a surface is completely ignored everywhere, making the object virtually invisible from the inside. The advantage of this feature would be that it can have uses other than simply removing the shadow line artifact.
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272 | Other | Feature Request | 3.70 RC6 | Defer | Very Low | Minor change, significant speedup in cubic polynomial s... | Tracked on GitHub | |
3.71 release |
Task Description
While familiarizing myself with the code, I found some small changes in the solve_cubic function that lead to a significant speedup.
In my experience, “pow” is by far the slowest function in math.h and replacing it with simpler functions usually makes a tremendous impact on the speed (it’s an order of magnitude slower than sqrt/exp/cbrt/log).
solve_cubic has a “pow” function that can be replaced by cbrt (cubic root), which is standard in ISO-C99 and should be available on all systems. Separate benchmarks of solve_cubic function show this change almost doubles the speed and does not lower the accuracy. As solve_cubic is part of the solution of quartic equation, this improves the speed for many primitives. Testing with a scene containing many torus intersection tests (attached below) I still observed almost 10% speedup (Intel, 4 threads, 2 hyperthreaded cores, antialiasing on, 600×600: from 91 to 84 seconds). And this is for a torus, where a lot of time is spent in the solve_quartic and cubic solver is only called once! Similar speedup should be expected for prism, ovus, sor and blob.
I do believe the cubic solver can be done without trigonometry, but that would mean changing the algorithm, introducing new bugs and requiring a lot of testing. However, the trigonometric evaluation can still be simplified (3% speedup in full torus benchmark).
These changes don’t affect the algorithm at all, they are mathematically identical to the existing code, so the changes can be applied immediately. I also included other changes just as suggestions. Every change is commented and marked with [SC 2.2013].
This sadly does not speedup the sturm solver, which uses bisection and regula-falsi and looks very optimized already.
The test scene I used has a lot of torus intersections from various directions (shadow rays, main rays, transmitted rays).
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300 | Other | Feature Request | 3.70 RC7 | Defer | Very Low | Reference Documentation Support | Tracked on GitHub | |
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Task Description
As emerged as an idea during the discussion of FS#299, an SDL / POV-Ray editor feature would be useful that allows API documentation via formal comments, e.g. in include files:
/**
* Creates a car object.
* @param a
* description of param a
* ...
*/
#macro car(a,b,c)
...
#end
In addition to the ability of (auto-)generating a documentation file from such comments, an editor window feature would be convenient that allows popup display of a macro’s (object’s / parameter’s / ...) documentation section.
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303 | Other | Definite Bug | 3.70 RC7 | Defer | Very Low | wrong bit depth reported for OpenEXR file format | Tracked on GitHub | |
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Task Description
When using OpenEXR output file format, POV-Ray erroneously reports it as “24 bpp EXR” in the message output, while in fact it generates a 3×16 = 48 bpp file.
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24 | Geometric Primitives | Definite Bug | 3.70 beta 32 | Very Low | Critical | isosurface, bounding box & threads | Closed | |
3.70 beta 33 |
Task Description
Linux beta 32, 64bits, compiled from sources.
povray -w800 -h600 +a0.3 +kfi1 +kff78 -L/usr/local/share/povray-3.7/scenes/incdemo -Ii_internal.pov +WT5 +R4 +AM1 +MB1
Important issue: +WT5 +MB1
Seems Fine for +WT1 +MB1 Also fine for +WT5 +MB9
The intersection with the containing box displays some two-shades of grey random checkered patterns. Size of square looks like size of renderering thread. Position too.
Impacted frames (of 78): 01, 02, 03, 30, 48, 74, 76.
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34 | Configure/Build | Possible Bug | 3.70 beta 32 | Very Low | Critical | configure: error: Could not link against boost_thread-b ... | Closed | |
3.70 beta 33 |
Task Description
I’ve been trying to upgrade povray 3.6.1 to 3.7-beta-32. I’ve configured with no additional arguments, and the configure dies with:
checking whether to build the boost thread library from sources... no checking for boostlib >= 1.35... yes checking whether the Boost::Thread library is available... yes checking for exit in -lboost_thread... no checking for exit in -lboost_thread-boost_thread... no configure: error: Could not link against boost_thread-boost_thread !
I figured that the problem was with my boost installation (1.35) and upgraded boost to 1.39; the problem remains. I tried to see if exit was defined in libboost_thread and/or libboost_thread-boost_thread and it isn’t. Just to be sure that my currrent setup works for the released version, I rebuilt/reninstalled 3.6.1, which went without problem.
I’m on a slackware-12.2 box, using gcc-4.4.0.
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51 | Parser/SDL | Definite Bug | 3.70 beta 32 | Very Low | Critical | POV-Ray crashes hard on missing parenthesis | Closed | |
3.70 beta 35 |
Task Description
The following (bogus) SDL code causes POV-Ray 3.7 beta to crash hard with an access violation:
#include "fubar.inc"
Bar(42)
#macro FooBar() #end
//fubar.inc
#macro Foo(Fnord) #end
#macro Bar(Ignord) Foo(23 #end
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218 | Sample scenes | Definite Bug | 3.70 RC3 | Very Low | Critical | Benchmark must be updated to not reference a #local arr ... | Closed | |
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Task Description
Lines 1217, 1241 and 1242 of benchmark.cpp must be change to use #declare instead of local for A and its elements. (because A is returned by the macro)
"#macro L_GetVN(ResSpl)\n"
" #local I = 0;\n"
" #declare A = array[ResSpl+1][2]\n" // <============== this is line 1217
" #while (I<=ResSpl)\n"
" #local P0 = 0+<FnA(I/ResSpl), I/ResSpl, 0>;\n"
" #if (P0.x=0 & P0.z=0)\n"
" #local P0 = <1e-25,P0.y,1e-25>;\n"
" #end\n"
" #if (I=0)\n"
" #local P1 = 0+<FnA(((I-0.5)/ResSpl)), I/ResSpl, 0>;\n"
" #local P2 = 0+<FnA(((I+0.5)/ResSpl)), I/ResSpl, 0>;\n"
" #else\n"
" #local P1 = P2;\n"
" #local P2 = 0+<FnA(((I+0.5)/ResSpl)), I/ResSpl, 0>;\n"
" #end\n"
" #local P3 = vrotate(P0,<0,1,0>);\n"
" #local P4 = vrotate(P0,<0,-1,0>);\n"
" #local B1 = P4-P0;\n"
" #local B2 = P2-P0;\n"
" #local B3 = P3-P0;\n"
" #local B4 = P1-P0;\n"
" #local N1 = vcross(B1,B2);\n"
" #local N2 = vcross(B2,B3);\n"
" #local N3 = vcross(B3,B4);\n"
" #local N4 = vcross(B4,B1);\n"
" #local N = vnormalize((N1+N2+N3+N4)*-1);\n"
" #declare A[I][0] = P0;\n" // <============== this is line 1241
" #declare A[I][1] = N;\n"
" #local I = I+1;\n"
" #end\n"
" A\n"
"#end\n"
Same update should also be reported into the distributed scene benchmark.pov
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59 | Geometric Primitives | Definite Bug | 3.70 beta 34 | Very Low | High | Cone intersection test broken | Closed | |
3.70 beta 35 |
Task Description
The following scene, showing an almost cylindrical cone floating above a plane, renders fine in POV 3.6.2, but is obviously broken in 3.7.0.beta.34:
camera {
right x
up y*image_height/image_width
location <80,50,40>
look_at <0,0,0>
}
light_source { <500,500,500> color rgb 1 }
cone {
<0,0,30>, 11.303000, <0,0,-30>, 11.302999
texture { pigment { color rgb 1 } }
}
plane { y, -20 texture { pigment { color rgb 0.3 } } }
The error occurs even with the -MB option, indicating that the problem has nothing to do with bounding, but is in the cone intersection testing code.
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77 | Geometric Primitives | Definite Bug | 3.70 beta 35 | Very Low | High | Cone is not on good place when first base point is lowe ... | Closed | |
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Task Description
Cone is not on good place when first base point is lower then end cap point. Example:
cone { <0, 0, 0>, 2, <0, 1, 0>, 1 } - good
cone { <0, 0, 0>, 1, <0, 1, 0>, 2 } - bad
This is on 3.7 beta 35 version.
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78 | Photons | Possible Bug | 3.70 beta 35a | Very Low | High | Wrong rendering of BeamTest-Scene in 3.7.beta.35a | Closed | |
3.70 beta 37 |
Task Description
Hi,
following scene will not be rendered correctly in 3.7.beta.35a:
http://lib.povray.org/collection/beamtest/cousin%20ricky%201.1/beamtest.html
maybe it is a configuration problem or it is a real bug.
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94 | Texture/Material/Finish | Definite Bug | 3.70 beta 36 | Very Low | High | Unexpected refraction angle in interfaces with changing ... | Closed | |
3.70 beta 37 |
Task Description
I’ve tried to model this setup: http://kschwebke.webng.com/povray/ior-interfaces/drawing.png with the following SDL: http://kschwebke.webng.com/povray/ior-interfaces/rs2.pov.txt
A small overlap between the two transparent solids is needed, because a gap would lead to total reflection. The camera in the test scene looks in the direction of the ray in the setup drawing. The setup is surrounded with angular markers, so one can easily read the final resulting looking angle.
POV-Ray 3.6.1 renders the expected result (~53° in the center of the screen): http://kschwebke.webng.com/povray/ior-interfaces/rs2-35.jpeg
POV-Ray 3.7.0b35a (compiled Unix source) renders a different (and in my opinion wrong) angle (~67°), however – for the very same scene file: http://kschwebke.webng.com/povray/ior-interfaces/rs2-37b35a.jpeg
I’ve started a discussion about this issue in povray.beta-test: http://news.povray.org/povray.beta-test/thread/%3Cweb.4bba4677730ab9f3e8c084b40%40news.povray.org%3E/
All linked documents are also attached.
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130 | Parser/SDL | Feature Request | 3.70 beta 37a | Very Low | High | Master scene unit system variable | Closed | |
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Task Description
Currently, many POV scenes/include files behave differently depending on the basic units used within the scene. Scaling them differently can affect things like ior and media. A master system variable that users can set to configure the scene’s units would be beneficial for sharing and collaboration purposes, so that person A’s glass interior works correctly in person B’s wine glass scene. Just like the #version system variable, it should have a default value but should be possible to explicitly override.
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179 | Runtime error | Definite Bug | 3.70 beta 40 | Very Low | High | unix version segfaults when $HOME not set | Closed | |
3.70 beta 41 |
Task Description
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.
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180 | Runtime error | Definite Bug | 3.70 beta 40 | Very Low | High | lseek64(fileno(fd), ...) is not the same as fseek64(fd, ... | Closed | |
3.70 RC1 |
Task Description
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.
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192 | Image format | Definite Bug | 3.6 | Very Low | High | png-1.5 breaks povray 3.6 | Closed | |
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Task Description
Trying to build povray-3.6 against png-1.5 fails spectacularly.
.../include/png.h:666: error: forward declaration of ‘struct png_info_def’ png_pov.cpp:1405: error: invalid use of undefined type ‘struct png_info_def’
appears a lot in the output.
The problem is that png-1.5 hides structure members from public view.
Note, this is not the same problem as FS#144 .
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217 | Other | Possible Bug | 3.70 RC3 | Very Low | High | raddem.ini with +C and some frames already done: failur ... | Closed | |
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Task Description
How to do it: (with raddem.ini & raddem.pov from distributed scenes, copied in local directory)
1. run “povray raddem.ini” until frame 6 or more (irrelevant, at least frame 1 & 2 are needed), interrupt the render. 2. restart “povray raddem.ini +C”
It fails at frame 2 with Possible Parse Error: Cannot find file ‘raddem.pov’, even after trying to append file type extension. Parse Error: Cannot open input file. Fatal error in parser: Cannot parse input. Render failed
The detection of frame 1 is fine.
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220 | Other | Compatibility Issue | 3.6 | Very Low | High | Error number -43 | Closed | |
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Task Description
REcently I installed POV-Ray tracing software in my mac OS X version 10.6.8. When I run the software its displaying a fatal error occured and the error number is -43. I’m new to POV-Ray...pls help me guys...
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227 | Refactoring/Cleanup | Unimp. Feature/TODO | 3.70 RC3 | Very Low | High | Fixed Vector Limitations | Tracked on GitHub | |
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Task Description
See this documentation entry for more details.
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235 | Platform-specific | Definite Bug | 3.70 RC3 | Very Low | High | Segmentation fault with animation of large image | Closed | |
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Task Description
Hopefully platform specific, other ports are welcome to check their scaling code.
Reported originally in p.beta-test (28 january 2012) by Cousin Ricky (email dropped)
Symptom: crash on start of second frame rendering Environment: Unix, with display of rendered picture, rendered picture does not fit at 1:1 on the display
Demo (adjust the H/W to your setting to get them larger, both or any of them):
global_settings { assumed_gamma 1 }
light_source { <-1, 1, -1> * 1000, rgb 1 }
sphere { 2.5 * z, 1 pigment { red 1 } }
povray +H2000 +W2000 +KI0 +KF1 +KFI0 +KFF10 code.pov
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238 | Parser/SDL | Possible Bug | 3.70 RC4 | Very Low | High | Error during #read causes file to be kept open | Closed | |
3.70 RC7 |
Task Description
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.
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244 | Texture/Material/Finish | Unimp. Feature/TODO | 3.70 RC5 | Very Low | High | Crand is disabled in 3.7 code | Closed | |
3.70 RC7 |
Task Description
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.
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283 | Other | Definite Bug | 3.70 RC7 | Very Low | High | Transparent or semi-transparent background color comes ... | Closed | |
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Task Description
When using the ‘background’ directive with a transparent color, for example:
background { color rgbt <0, 0, 0, 1> }
the final image is still opaque (both the one displayed in the render window and the PNG actually saved to disk).
Expected behaviour is for it to be transparent.
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285 | Documentation | Definite Bug | Not applicable | Very Low | High | wiki.povray.org is not editable | Closed | |
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Task Description
I cannot edit any pages on wiki.povray.org, even after confirming my e-mail address.
This means that I cannot add any documentation, help improve the documentation, fix errors or help in any other way.
If you want contributions to the documentation, you should let users edit pages.
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