POV-Ray

The text object isn’t working with /usr/share/fonts/truetype/freefont/FreeSans.ttf. Used to work - taken from an old .pov file of mine.

Rebuilt from
http://www.povray.org/redirect/www.povray.org/ftp/pub/povray/Official/Unix/povray-3.6.tar.bz2

$ povray +ifonttest.pov +ofonttest.png

Persistence of Vision™ Ray Tracer Version 3.6.1 (g++ 4.4.3 @
x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu)
This is an unofficial version compiled by:
darxus [at] chaosreignscom

.....

File: fonttest.pov Line: 8
Parse Warning: Character 101 (0×65) not found in /usr/share/fonts/truetype/freefont/FreeSans.ttf
File: fonttest.pov Line: 8
Parse Warning: Character 115 (0×73) not found in /usr/share/fonts/truetype/freefont/FreeSans.ttf

Verification that the problem is not in the .ttf file, this works (imagemagick):

convert -background lightblue -fill blue -pointsize 48 -font
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/freefont/FreeSans.ttf label:test fonttest.png

Problem verified when compiled from source on Ubuntu Lucid. Also exists in Ubuntu binaries from Lucid and Hardy.

I’d like to request the ability to create a date/time stamp on output images so that new renders don’t always overwrite old ones. Thanks.

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

the quick_color feature doesn’t work when +qN or Quality=N is set to 5 or below

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.

Currently, output image is buffered using POV-Ray’s RGBFT color model and floating point values, leading to a memory consumption of 20 bit per pixel. This is an unproportionally large memory footprint, given that the only further processing performed on the buffered data is conversion of the data to the desired output file format, which will typically use only 3 bytes per pixel (at most 12 bit per pixel).

The situation can be improved by choosing the output image buffer container based on the desired output file format and parameters. To this end, the following code changes should be made:

• Bundle image file format handler code into classes (typically one per file format)
• Include a method to determine the best data container type for the image buffer
• Instantiate the desired image file format handler object prior to rendering, querying the handler object for an image buffer

In addition to picking a suitable image data container from the already existing palette, careful design might also allow to use custom containers to directly pass the data to a library (in case the library provides its own buffering anyway), or write it directly to the output file (e.g. when writing image data to stdout). To make this compatible with multithreaded rendering, the following changes would have to be made:

• Add code to detect when a row of SMP blocks has been finished, and call a certain method on the image handler object
• Design the custom containers in such a way that they can buffer any number of unfinished SMP block rows as needed

Bounding box computation for CSG intersection appears to be broken when one member is an arbitrarily transformed plane.

// +W640 +H480 +MB1

#include "transforms.inc"

camera {
  location  <-0.2, 0.5, -4.0>
  direction 1.5*z
  right     x*image_width/image_height
  look_at   <0.0, 0.0,  0.0>
}

sky_sphere {
  pigment {
    gradient y
    color_map {
      [0.0 rgb <0.6,0.7,1.0>]
      [0.7 rgb <0.0,0.1,0.8>]
    }
  }
}

light_source {
  <0, 0, 0>            // light's position (translated below)
  color rgb <1, 1, 1>  // light's color
  translate <-30, 30, -30>
}

plane {
  y, -1
  pigment { color rgb <0.7,0.5,0.3> }
}

intersection {
  sphere {
    0.0, 1 }
  plane { -x, 0 transform { Shear_Trans(x,y+x*0.3,z) } }
  texture {
    pigment {
      radial
      frequency 8
      color_map {
        [0.00 color rgb <1.0,0.4,0.2> ]
        [0.33 color rgb <0.2,0.4,1.0> ]
        [0.66 color rgb <0.4,1.0,0.2> ]
        [1.00 color rgb <1.0,0.4,0.2> ]
      }
    }
    finish{
      specular 0.6
    }
  }
  rotate -y*5
}

In some cases it may be desirable to run POV-Ray from a batch file, without causing it to “steal the focus”.

I suggest making this dependant on whether POV-Ray is run with the /EXIT parameter.

Tested with beta 40. Also affect version 3.6.1 as reported in the discution group.

When using radiosity and emissive media. Any object, or part of, that is inside the media container is not affected by the illumination comming from the media.

When using scattering media, the light scattered by the media also don’t affect objects that are inside it’s container.

http://news.povray.org/povray.newusers/thread/%3C4cf8fe22%241%40news.povray.org%3E/

At the moment in the Poly Object the maximum power is 15. The mathematics for converting the three parametric equations for x, y and z into a formula for the Poly Object require that the equations are squared several times given max-powers of 4, 8 and even 16. I’ve one eqaution that needs power 16. At the moment this is just one power short. Please raise this to 16. That’s all I ask for.

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

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 got a 29023 Segmentation fault ... but it was NOT repeatable. I reran the render job repeatedly and it displayed appropriate error message. I had renamed a texture identifier but missed an occurrence inside texture_map.

FYI: I did a build off the depot last evening.(21:13)

couple of observations:

if no photons are gathered (hey it happens ... my typo) when attempting to save a photon map the warning message just indicates that it couldn’t save the map, maybe the message could be enhanced to say something like: No photons were gathered so no map information was saved. At first I thought something had changed in my I/O restrictions (I’m writing to an image directory not current or work directory)

when reading a previously saved photon map there is no indication that it was read in other than the end stats showing a small amount of photon time. I don’t recall but didn’t v3.6 indicate that the a previously saved map was being used? Just for the heck of it I moved the map file aside and it did prove to me that it was indeed being input. Some sort of message at the time the file is read in might be helpful.

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.

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 f = function { x }
#end

#local f = 1;
A()

This gives:

File 'bug.pov' line 2: Parse Error: Attempted to redefine float identifier as
 function identifier.

The problem is that this makes using functions in library macros difficult. Basically, they must have a globally unique name that’s not used in any of the macros or files that call the macros. #undef doesn’t really help, because it destroys the identifier in the calling scope.

For example, one of the macros in the standard include files names a function “fn”, so this doesn’t work:

#include "transforms.inc"

#local fn = 42; // fnord?
#local fn_pos = vtransform(x, transform { rotate 30*y } );

The reason for this restriction is explained in Parse_RValue in source/backend/parser/parse.cpp:

    // Do NOT allow to redefine functions! [trf]
    //   #declare foo = function(x) { x }
    //   #declare foo = function(x) { foo(x) } // Error!
    // Reason: Code like this would be unreadable but possible. Is it
    // a recursive function or not? - It is not recursive because the
    // foo in the second line refers to the first function, which is
    // not logical. Further, recursion is not supported in POV-Ray 3.5
    // anyway. However, allowing such code now would cause problems
    // implementing recursive functions after POV-Ray 3.5!

In this case the restriction is applied too broadly: it should be safe to redefine anything other than a function to a function and still avoid it looking like recursion. In fact, there’s a restriction in Parse_Declare specifically to prevent redefining functions.

It would be nice when quitting a render if the remaining space were filled with empty pixels. That way the partial render will still be viewable in all image apps.

For the next beta version, could you please create a new desktop icon? I keep clicking on the wrong version.

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
            }
        }
}    } 

Thin tori exhibit artifacts in 3.7.0 RC3 when the camera is placed inside the torus close to its “center plane”, as can be demonstrated with the following scene:

camera {
  location  <0.0, 0.0, -0.5>
  direction 1.5*z
  right     x*image_width/image_height
  look_at   <0.0, 0.0,  0.0>
  angle 1
}

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

torus {
  1, 0.001
  texture { pigment { color red 1 } }
}

Keyword Completion does not work for several names.
I miss it for animation related names like frame_number or final_frame.

Typing “fram{TAB}” just inserts a TAB character after “fram” instead of completing it to frame_number.

Independently of that bug, typing {TAB} repeatedly does not cycle through possible names:
“fr{TAB}” gives “frequency” and “fresnel” and that’s all.

In version 3.6 it worked well.

My system is Windows 7 64bit and PovRay is 3.7.0.RC3.msvc9.win64

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.

There is a long animation to render.

computer 1 should render 0..799
computer 2 should render 800..1599

And after this, You have a bad surprise with the filenames.

animation799.png
animation0800.png

There should be a seting how many digits a file name in an animation should have.

This avoids, that there are series of pictures with 3 and other with 4 digit filenames.

BTW: All the experiences for this feature requests had been made during producing
http://roland.pege.org/2011-gusi-peace-prize/calculation-error.htm

parser fails to report when an illegal map_type is used. For example map_type 10 and map_type 100 doesn’t produce an error

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.

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

Suggestion:

In file screen.inc, have macro Screen_Object() set no_radiosity on the object.

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.

I’ve got an ini file that looks like this:

Post_Frame_Return=U
Post_Frame_Command=notepad.exe

And when I render a scene using that ini file, it renders correctly but then
gives me this error:

Render halted because the post-frame shell-out (’notepad.exe’) requested POV-Ray
to generate a user abort.
Render failed

.....and it doesn’t open notepad.

I’ve unchecked the “Disable Starting Other Programs” and I’ve tried various
variations on what exe to run and whether to do it Pre/Post Frame/Scene, and
nothing has worked.

I’ve had a series of what appear to be a hang up’s. They passed parse, reported some stats and issued the Rendering... message and opened the preview window, but never progressed. They continued to accumulate cpu time until I eventually had to kill -9, softer didn’t work.

I’ve been dismissing them up until now wanted to speak up because I finally got this crash:

29623 Segmentation fault

Here’s some observed behaviors:

In my scene I have a Round_Box_Union with /just/ a pigment that rendered fine, but when I added a wood texture from the distribution includes, it hung up after I tried to transform the texture in any way. Tried other distribution textures ... same thing.

I spent time going through different scenarios looking for a common cause (thinking I’m doing something wrong). Eventually I arrived at the point that I killed a hung render, and restarted the same render with no changes. Sometimes it would render, sometimes not ... I finally got the above mentioned Round_Box_Union to behave with a simple reflective texture, and the rounding parameter had to be above 0.1 ... I settled at 0.125. OK by now you’re thinking WTF right?

No more problems until I accidentally (typo) put an additional light_source at the same location as another light_source. It also hung sometimes, and rendered fine sometimes after a kill ... no SDL changes.

Now I can’t tell you exactly what I was doing when the seg fault happened, but I /do/ know I just restarted the render with no changes. I’m starting to think there’s some kind of instability happening here. I realize that I’m probably the only team member spending any real time with the application, so none of you probably haven’t noticed anything suspicious.

Any comments ... ideas ... suggestions?

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/

As I posted yesterday to the POV bugreports, I observed a bug with the #write directive, having forgotten the closing bracket. I looked a little bit closer and found different behaviours of POV with different array sizes.

With ArrayDim=100 (please look at the attached SDL-code, which is reduced as much as possible and produces only the bug and no scene) one get the Parse Error: “Expected ‘string’, End of File found instead” and the last line is highlighted. With ArrayDim=1024 you get an Stack Overflow and POV crashes.

I observed this at two different core i7 windows machines. On one of them (16 GB RAM, if this is of importance) the threshold between both behaviours was between 300 and 400. Hope this helps.

Best regards,
Michael

Originally resolved in https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=425450.
Attached is a patch with Gentoo-specific code removed.

There are two parts in this issue:

• The newer boost library requires downstream users to explicitly link to the boost system library (-lboost_system).
• The newer boost library replaced TIME_UTC with TIME_UTC_, because glibc added TIME_UTC.

When running make on Linux, the backend source files (and possibly others?) are apparently compiled twice: first from the .../source/backend/ directory, and another time from the .../source/ directory. As an example, here are the corresponding lines for sphsweep.cpp:

g++ -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I../.. -I../.. -I../../source -I../../source -I../../source/base -I../../unix -I../../vfe 
-I../../vfe/unix -pthread -I/usr/include/OpenEXR    -pthread -I/usr/include  -pipe -Wno-multichar -Wno-write-strin
gs -fno-enforce-eh-specs -s -O3 -ffast-math -pthread -MT sphsweep.o -MD -MP -MF .deps/sphsweep.Tpo -c -o sphsweep.
o `test -f 'shape/sphsweep.cpp' || echo './'`shape/sphsweep.cpp

g++ -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I..  -I.. -I../source/backend -I../source/base -I../source/frontend -I../unix -I../vfe -I.
./vfe/unix -pthread -I/usr/include/OpenEXR    -pthread -I/usr/include  -pipe -Wno-multichar -Wno-write-strings -fno
-enforce-eh-specs -s -O3 -ffast-math -pthread -MT sphsweep.o -MD -MP -MF .deps/sphsweep.Tpo -c -o sphsweep.o `test 
-f 'backend/shape/sphsweep.cpp' || echo './'`backend/shape/sphsweep.cpp

This is especially annoying on platforms that are rather slow at compiling.

Compiling the sources with clang instead of g++ (on ubuntu 12.10 with boost 1.50)

./configure COMPILED_BY=”your name here <also@email>” LIBS=-lboost_system –disable-io-restrictions CC=clang CXX=clang

there is a few warnings that catch the eyes (and other as well that I dismiss so far, such as cases not covered in switch and empty body in if, or extraneous parentheses in tests):

support/randomsequences.cpp:553:15: warning: field is uninitialized when used here [-Wuninitialized]
                        startIndex(startIndex)
                                   ^
support/randomsequences.cpp:553:15: warning: field is uninitialized when used here [-Wuninitialized]
support/randomsequences.cpp:974:40: note: in instantiation of member function 'pov::PrecomputedNumberGenerator<int>::PrecomputedNumberGenerator' requested here
        SeedableIntGeneratorPtr generator(new PrecomputedIntGenerator(factory, count));
                                              ^
support/randomsequences.cpp:553:15: warning: field is uninitialized when used here [-Wuninitialized]
                        startIndex(startIndex)
                                   ^
support/randomsequences.cpp:984:43: note: in instantiation of member function 'pov::PrecomputedNumberGenerator<double>::PrecomputedNumberGenerator' requested here
        SeedableDoubleGeneratorPtr generator(new PrecomputedDoubleGenerator(factory, count));
                                                 ^
support/randomsequences.cpp:553:15: warning: field is uninitialized when used here [-Wuninitialized]
                        startIndex(startIndex)
                                   ^
support/randomsequences.cpp:1011:43: note: in instantiation of member function 'pov::PrecomputedNumberGenerator<pov::Vector3d>::PrecomputedNumberGenerator' requested here
                return SequentialVectorGeneratorPtr(new PrecomputedVectorGenerator(factory, count));
                                                        ^
support/randomsequences.cpp:553:15: warning: field is uninitialized when used here [-Wuninitialized]
                        startIndex(startIndex)
                                   ^
support/randomsequences.cpp:1056:45: note: in instantiation of member function 'pov::PrecomputedNumberGenerator<pov::Vector2d>::PrecomputedNumberGenerator' requested here
                return SequentialVector2dGeneratorPtr(new PrecomputedVector2dGenerator(factory, count));

Self referencing member in creator does not seems to be great for a reproducible pseudorandom generator (some compiler/architecture might force to 0, other might not... seems bad karma).

                           
             povmscpp.cpp:1875:4: warning: delete called on 'POVMS_MessageReceiver::HandlerOO' that is abstract but has non-virtual destructor [-Wdelete-non-virtual-dtor]
                        delete nodeptr->handleroo;
                        ^
povmscpp.cpp:1877:4: warning: delete called on 'POVMS_MessageReceiver::Handler' that is abstract but has non-virtual destructor [-Wdelete-non-virtual-dtor]
                        delete nodeptr->handler;
                        ^

Maybe just a missing keyword (virtual) in the header file ? Or is it harder ?

shelloutprocessing.cpp:260:28: warning: expression result unused [-Wunused-value]
        for (s = str.c_str(); *s; *s++)
                                  ^~~~

Why “*s++” ? why not just “s++” ?

renderfrontend.cpp:1165:57: warning: trigraph ignored [-Wtrigraphs]
                                        default:                                    t = "(???)";                            break;
 

I guess it’s not an intended trigraph. Might nevertheless perturb some compiler/result.

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.

A pigment statement not wrapped in a texture statement does not properly override a pigment previously defined for the object. In the following SDL code:

  #declare PLANE = plane { y,0
    texture {
      pigment { checker color rgb 1 color rgb 0 scale 0.1 }
  } }
  object { PLANE
    pigment { checker color red 1 color blue 1 scale 1.0 }
  }

the scaling of the pigment previously specified for the PLANE object is retained for the new pigment. Compare:

  #declare PLANE = plane { y,0
    texture {
      pigment { checker color rgb 1 color rgb 0 scale 0.1 }
  } }
  object { PLANE
    texture {
      pigment { checker color red 1 color blue 1 scale 1.0 }
  } }

which behaves as expected.

The issue has been around at least since POV-Ray 3.6.2.