POV-Ray

Installation script (from sources) when run with a classical “sudo make install” would create povray.ini & povray.conf in $HOME/.povray/3.7 (so far so fine) with the owner as root and the permission to readonly for the real user.

Same goes for the owner of the 3.7 directories tree : .povray & .povray/3.7 are created with root owner, despite being in $HOME of the performing user.

Please fix ?

...for instance nVidia’s CUDA architecture, discussed here and other places.

General consensus is that it’s not worth the effort if only a partial set of POV-Ray’s features are possible.

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.

From post in povray.general (circa 29 september 2010: “Maximum Resolution of Renders?”)

The ultimate goal would be a 41000×41000 image. However each time I have attempted to render that Pov-Ray has crashed on
me. Even when using a single, simple test object (a plain white sphere that
should use a single pixel). So I think this is running into a program limitation
at present.

It won’t be for the faint hearted: a 30500 x 30500 does still produces the bug, but you’d better have 24 GB of true ram to test it.
(it’s a render of a few “real” minutes if you do not swap, for any very quick scene (a 305 x 305 in 0.117s moved to 220s for 30500×30500 on my system when corrected))

With core-dumped enable, the issue is pointed in the creator of PixelContainer.
The problem is due to the resize() parameter: despite the parameter being a size_t (8 bytes long on 64bits), the computation ( h * w * 5 ) use unsigned int for h & w (and signed int for 5).

As a consequence, the value of resize is computed as a signed int... havoc might happen when the signed bit (#31) is propagated to the #63 to #32 of size_t... vector does not enjoy a negative value for resize (and destroy itself: no iterator on coming soon call! hence the crash when the values in the vector are to be initialised)

30500²: (in hex)

1 15 3C 71 50 floats
4 54 F1 C5 40 bytes

Basic solution: promote the 5 to an unsigned long, forcing the computation to happen on unsigned long, avoiding promotion of silly sign-bit, and keeping the resize’s value as a good number.

aka: resize( w * h * 5) becomes resize ( w * h * 5ul )

This solution has been tested and seems fine (it’s just that in base/image/image.cpp, there is a lot of resize()!).
For all resize(), the “ul” must be added. (and that means also that resize( w * h ) must be rewritten as ( w * h * 1ul ). )

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.

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 .

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.

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.

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

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...

I tried to render a candle’s flame (an object with interior made of emission media) against an Alpha background. In 3.6, the “flame” appears as a bright object against the alpha background; but in 3.7, the flame disappears against the alpha (as the attached scene will make clear, the “flame” is still visible against opaque background objects). I used the settings “Output_Alpha=true Output_File_Type=N”.

If there is another (better?) way to achieve a similar effect, I am open to using a work-around.

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

If the image is more than 1270 pixels wide or more than 720 pixels high, animation fails with a segmentation fault during the second rendered frame. This happens after parsing is complete and the .pov-state file is created. The last message line is the “[Rendering...]” line. (There is also a separate, but possibly related, issue that the output display does not work for these renders.)

On one occasion, POV-Ray hung, and I had to ctrl-Z kill -9 out of it.

On another occasion, instead of the segmentation fault, I got the message:

povray: xcb_io.c:140: dequeue_pending_request: Assertion `req == dpy->xcb->pending_requests' failed.
Aborted

There is no crash when -D is used.

I have not run an animation this large in Windows, so I don’t know if it’s a problem there.

Neither problem occurs in POV-Ray 3.6.1.

I used the following source code:

global_settings { assumed_gamma 1 }
light_source { <-1, 1, -1> * 1000, rgb 1 }
sphere { 2.5 * z, 1 pigment { red 1 } }

Platform

Libraries

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?

When using mesh_camera type ‘0’

The first line of the mesh output seems to be repeated resulting in incorrect light colour values.

If the first line of the texture is skipped then the values seem to be correct.

The documentation states mesh_camera 0 should produce 1 pixel per index but it currently seems to produce 1 lighting pixel per face.

This output seems fairly meaningless as using this data for vertex colours (presumably the intention for mesh_camera 0) would result in a flat shaded model.

Logically it would make more sense to output 1 pixel per vertex instead of 1 pixel per face. Another solution might 1 pixel per face index (as per documentation) although POV would need to record which indices had already been computed otherwise it could end up duplicating computation.

At the moment I’ve written a code workaround for my exporter which produces a special mesh but this is obviously a much more complex solution to a fairly simple problem.

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.

Output images are 0.5 pixels too right and 0.5 pixels too down (mesh_camera_bug.pov).

The error is cumulative when image files are used again as texture (run 10 times mesh_camera_bug_reuse.pov).

This can be compensated by adjusting UV maps (mesh_camera_fix.pov and mesh_camera_fix_reuse.pov).

Tested with and without anti-aliasing.

I would like to suggest an additional feature regarding splines. POV-Ray’s spline objects (spline {}) are very useful to create animation paths as a function of time from reference points; however, in many cases you do not only need a position to place an object correctly, but also its velocity etc., e.g. if you are animating a car moving along a spline you do not only need to know where the car is at a given clock value but also in which direction it is going. If you want to rotate the wheels correctly you even need to know how this direction is currently changing.

In a nutshell, if you are using splines to create an animation path, you might not only need the spline value itself, but also the value of its first and second derivative. So I suggest adding an SDL capability to access these values like it is possible to access the spline value for a given parameter.

I do not think it would be too difficult to add a feature like this as far as the backend is concerned, since for computing a (cubic) spline you need the first and second derivatives anyway. (They are probably not being stored separately, but a polynomial is not that hard to differentiate.)

Indeed I do not know how an SDL language construct for it should look like (i.e. whether to use ' and ‘’ like in mathematics or a second spline function parameter).

In POV-Ray’s documentation it says:

3.2.2.2 Max Image Buffer Memory
This INI parameter sets the number of megabytes of RAM to allow for output image caching. If the output image happens to use more than this, a file backed temporary image is used instead.

I used this INI file option because the default value (128 megabytes) seemed insufficient. pov-state backend files were always created and they were remarkably larger than the resulting image (bmp) files. Consequently, I set

Max_Image_Buffer_Memory = 3096

in the INI file so that POV-Ray should, according to the documentation, now be able to use 3 gigabytes of RAM so no backend temporary file would be needed at all (this large they were never).

However, while POV-Ray was rendering I still discovered a pov-state file and it still had a similar size.

Now I am confused: did the INI option not work or have I misunderstood the documentation? If the former is the case, that would be a bug, wouldn’t it?

I tested both under Windows XP and Debian 6.0.5.

see my post titled: “area light and radiosity problem?” in povray.binary.images [Edit - copied that post’s text here - clipka]

wondering about what’s going on here with this series of images. the radiosity and area light settings are unchanged from image to image, and all I did was radiosity on/off and area_light on/off (btw: using rad_def “Normal” settings)

the 1st image is radiosity only, the 2nd is area light only, and the 3rd combines them:

what’s up with blotches? change #5819/5820 (octree) or maybe something still with area lights?

The following editor issue experienced in 3.7 RC 6 under Win7/64::

Place the curser at the middle of a row.
Press enter. Now the line has been split and the cursor is at the beginning of the new line, followed by the rest of the original line
Press backspace.
Instead of restoring the original line, the second part of the line disappears.

RC 3 under Vista/32 (and earlier versions) behave normally.

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.

Currently neither of these pages:

  http://www.povray.org/documentation/view/3.7.0/253/

  http://www.povray.org/documentation/view/3.7.0/90/

mention that the background can be transparent. Any normal user will try to give “background { ... }” a transparent color, see that it doesn’t work, and assume that POV-ray can’t do it.

The pages should mention the +UA command-line option, which enables the transparency.

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.

This is an annoying little bug in the Windows GUI:

Installed 3.7 RC07 on Windows 8.
No previous povray installation on this machine.

How to reproduce error :

- Open a file in the editor.

- Right click on the files tab. This opens a popup menu showing “Open containing folder/Copy file to clipboard/....”.

-Now each selection in this menu does open the containing Folder. I cannot close or run any of the other actions in this menu.

Included math.inc into scene and recieved this fatal error from povray:

File '/usr/local/share/povray-3.7/include/math.inc' line 248: Parse Error: Expected 'string expression', float function 'vlength' found instead

Appropriate place in math.inc:

245 > #end
246 >
247 > // Distance between V1 and V2
248 > #macro VDist(V1, V2) vlength(V1 - V2) #end
249 >
250 > // Returns a vector perpendicular to V

Running newly-downloaded/newly-compiled POV-Ray 3.7.0, on Linux x86_64 system

There are times when scaling an entire scene up or down is difficult or just not feasible.

One suggestion is a global_settings option.

Also, I’ve noticed that in some situations, such as interactions between certain transparent objects, the epsilon seems to kick in quite early. Perhaps there could be situational or contextual epsilons, such as the “tolerance” of sphere_sweep or the “accuracy” of isosurface.

After a long parse period and a relatively quick rendering, POVray gets stuck at 99% when rendering the attached file.

Rendered at 6144x3072px with antialiasing set to 0.3.

Can anyone confirm?

can not run POV-Ray on ubuntu 14.04, boost 1.54,

./configure COMPILED_BY=”Dmitry <my>”

...

Libraries
---------
checking whether to link with cygwin DLL... no
checking whether to enable static linking... no
checking for the pthreads library -lpthreads... no
checking whether pthreads work without any flags... no
checking whether pthreads work with -Kthread... no
checking whether pthreads work with -kthread... no
checking for the pthreads library -llthread... no
checking whether pthreads work with -pthread... yes
checking for joinable pthread attribute... PTHREAD_CREATE_JOINABLE
checking if more special flags are required for pthreads... no
checking for boostlib >= 1.37... yes
checking whether the Boost::Thread library is available... yes
checking whether the boost thread library is usable... no
configure: error: in `/home/di/workspace2/povray-3.7-stable':
configure: error: cannot link with the boost thread library

log in attach file

Hi,

I think I may have found a bug in the subsurface/radiosity features of Povray 3.7 attached image showing the issue and sample files required to reproduce. The original files (on povray forum images thread) had different radiosity settings but these ones show the problem and only take a few seconds to render the image without AA so probably better for bug fixing/testing etc.

Thanks

Sean

When using mesh_camera type ‘0’

The first line of the mesh output seems to be repeated resulting in incorrect light colour values.

If the first line of the texture is skipped then the values seem to be correct.

On Windows 7 and newer operating systems, some programs are able to display their progress in the taskbar buttons.

Here is an example of Chrome downloading something and showing the progress in the taskbar:

http://www.winbeta.org/sites/default/files/news/oldfashinoned.jpg

Here is an example with Paint.NET instead:

http://www.getpaint.net/images/pdn351_superbarProgress.png

I think this feature would use fewer CPU resources than a) minimizing/maximizing the whole application window each time you want to check progress, or b) hovering the mouse over the taskbar button to show the thumbnails.