POV-Ray

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.

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 .

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

#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.

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 } }
}

In the folder “ready made scenes”, there is the file “B0 - Basic scene 11 - pure white background.txt”.
The text string to be rendered lacks the “e” in “pure”. Unfortunately, this makes the typo visible in the “Insert menu” preview image.

If the “e” is added, the text needs to be scaled a bit smaller (0.43 instead of 0.44) to fit inside the view.

The following code contains a possible “fix” (whatever).
It would be great if someone could fix this easy issue:

text { ttf "arial.ttf", "pure white background", 0.02, 0.0 // thickness, offset
       texture{ pigment{ color rgb<1,0.6,0>*0.5 } 
                finish { phong 0.1 }
              } // end of texture

       scale<1,1.25,1>*0.43
       translate<-2.10,-0.30,0.00 >
      } // end of text object ---------------------------------------------

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

The documentation says:

“-J Sets aa-jitter off”

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

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).

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

instead of

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

or

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

POV-Ray 3.62 renders all variants as expected.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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/

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.

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

See this thread for more information.

Windows allows you to associate programs with file extensions using the “Open with” file manager right-click menu extension.

I’m running Windows 7 64bit, and installed the 64 bit versions of 3.6.2 and the beta appropriately.

A couple of problems that I haven’t tested very thoroughly:

1. If you have both POV 3.6.2 and the beta installed at the same time, you can no longer using this dialog change the association to the beta once it has been created for 3.6.2. There’s no error or anything; it just opens the file inside 3.6.2 instead. Maybe because both versions appear as “POV-Ray for Windows” to this dialog? Would adding the version number to the name fix things? Anything I can do on my end of things to resolve this?

2. In POV-Ray 3.6.2, I can use this dialog to open *.inc, *.txt and other files in POV-Ray, but only if POV-Ray isn’t already running. If POV-Ray is already running I get an “Only /EDIT and /RENDER may be passed to previous instance” error. Files with the *.pov extension open properly regardless, without any error. I am unable to test this in the beta at the moment due to the first problem unfortunately. Could someone please test this with the beta and confirm whether the behavior also exists?

3. With the POV-Ray 3.7 beta, entering the following command in the command prompt results in the same error:

   "C:\Program Files\POV-Ray for Windows v3.7\bin\pvengine64.exe" "D:\Working\Povray\GearHead\LoadingScreen\btr_maanji.pov"

If I change it to the following it works however:

   "C:\Program Files\POV-Ray for Windows v3.7\bin\pvengine64.exe" /EDIT "D:\Working\Povray\GearHead\LoadingScreen\btr_maanji.pov"

Is this error/behavior really necessary? Would it be OK to instead change the behavior when the /EDIT flag is omitted in the
command-line such that the file is opened in the editor by default, without throwing an error?

Include file golds.inc still provides warnings when parsed, a shame for a standard include file.
(colors.inc is ok, I did not test the other includes)

File '/usr/local/share/povray-3.7/include/golds.inc' line 118: Parse Warning:
 Expected pure RGB color expression, unexpected filter and transmit components
 will have no effect.
File '/usr/local/share/povray-3.7/include/golds.inc' line 119: Parse Warning:
 Expected pure RGB color expression, unexpected filter and transmit components
 will have no effect.
File '/usr/local/share/povray-3.7/include/golds.inc' line 129: Parse Warning:
 Expected pure RGB color expression, unexpected filter and transmit components
 will have no effect.
File '/usr/local/share/povray-3.7/include/golds.inc' line 130: Parse Warning:
 Expected pure RGB color expression, unexpected filter and transmit components
 will have no effect.
File '/usr/local/share/povray-3.7/include/golds.inc' line 140: Parse Warning:
 Expected pure RGB color expression, unexpected filter and transmit components
 will have no effect.
File '/usr/local/share/povray-3.7/include/golds.inc' line 141: Parse Warning:
 Expected pure RGB color expression, unexpected filter and transmit components
 will have no effect.
File '/usr/local/share/povray-3.7/include/golds.inc' line 151: Parse Warning:
 Expected pure RGB color expression, unexpected filter and transmit components
 will have no effect.
File '/usr/local/share/povray-3.7/include/golds.inc' line 152: Parse Warning:
 Expected pure RGB color expression, unexpected filter and transmit components
 will have no effect.
File '/usr/local/share/povray-3.7/include/golds.inc' line 162: Parse Warning:
 Expected pure RGB color expression, unexpected filter and transmit components
 will have no effect.
File '/usr/local/share/povray-3.7/include/golds.inc' line 163: Parse Warning:
 Expected pure RGB color expression, unexpected filter and transmit components
 will have no effect.

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.
}

The included scenes\advanced\benchmark.pov (v1.02)is different then the winpov menu render\run benchmark (v2.01).

The winpov menu render\run benchmark is missing some objects, turned off in early betas?

In the tray icon, I’d like to see the render progress indicated somehow icon itself. Either a set of numbers (percents), or a change in color of the icon (e.g. from top to bottom). Something like the attached images.

The documentation entries for shapes.inc, shapes_old.inc, shapes2.inc, shapesq.inc, etc. should have thumbnails next to the object descriptions.

There should be a table of contents on each page of the documentation, or at least on the very long pages. Scrolling through the entire page to figure out what topics are covered sucks.

Request a system variable to test whether a scene file has been included by another scene file.

For instance:

#if (is_included)
  camera {...}
#end

Using the concat function is tedious. Why not just have an operator with which to concatenate strings?

“Hello " + “world!”

“Hello " . “world!”

In POV 3.6 you could set the Statistic_File option to a custom file and folder path. In the beta I get an “Cannot open file” error. Has the feature been intentionally removed or did it become broken?

The following line in the lathe1a.pov, lathe1b.pov, and lathe1c.pov appears to have an error in it.

  <3.6.9>, <4, 1.1>, <3.4, 2>, <3, 1>, <2, 1>,

Although it works in version 3.6, only in 3.7 does a render time error ocurr.

Scene source should be adjusted to the following

  <3.6, 0.9>, <4, 1.1>, <3.4, 2>, <3, 1>, <2, 1>,

When right-clicking on a tab in the editor window a list of options should appear, such as:

* Close
* Close all but this
* Save
* Save as
* Print

See Notepad++, EditPad Lite, and Firefox for examples.

Automatic removal of user-specified bounding boxes cannot be disabled in current POV-Ray 3.7 betas; the Remove_Bounds ini file setting and the +/-UR command line option are silently ignored.

Assuming there are no performance issues, it would be nice to tell Povray to select the pixels to render randomly, so that the image gets filled in gradually instead of from top to bottom and from left to right.

Also, maybe an option to tell it to render every Nth pixel.

OpenEXR output currently writes an alpha channel when Output_Alpha=off (-UA), and does not write an alpha channel when Output_Alpha=on (+UA), i.e. doing it just the wrong way round.

There are various scripts around the Net meant for approximating things like isosurfaces and parametric objects using meshes. It would probably run bit faster and be easier to use if this were supported natively within Povray. The feature would require an additional object parameter in order to toggle this behavior on/off.

Reflections in multi-layered textures are broken in 3.7 betas, as can be demonstrated with the following scene showing two reflective hemispheres on a checkered plane:

camera {
  location  <1.0, 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>
}

default {
 finish { diffuse 0 ambient 0 specular 0 }
}

// ----------------------------------------

plane {               // checkered floor
  y, -1
  texture
  {
    pigment { checker color rgb 1 color blue 1 }
    finish{ diffuse 0.8 ambient 0.1 }
  }
}

// left hemisphere
intersection {
  sphere { 0, 1 }
  plane { x, -0.002 }
  texture {
    pigment { color rgb 1 }
    finish{ reflection { 0.5 } }
  }
  texture {
    pigment { color rgbt 1 }
    finish{ reflection { 0.4 } }
  }
  texture {
    pigment { color rgbt 1 }
    finish{ reflection { 0.1 } }
  }
}

// right hemisphere
intersection {
  sphere { 0, 1 }
  plane { -x, -0.002 }
  texture {
    pigment { color rgb 1 }
    finish{ reflection { 1.0 } }
  }
}

Note that the reflection parameters of the left, multi-layered hemisphere sum up to 1.0, i.e. the same value as used in the single layer in the right hemisphere.

The first attached file (test_3.6.2.png), rendered with POV-Ray 3.6.2, shows the expected output: Both hemispheres appear to have the same reflectivity.

The second attached file (test_3.7.0.beta37a.png), rendered with POV-Ray 3.7.0.beta.37a, shows a much brighter left (multi-layered) sphere.

As it turns out, in order to get the expected result with POV-Ray 3.7.0.beta.37a, the reflectivity of each layer must be divided by 3, 2 and 1, respectively (which obviously does not sum up to 1.0):

  ...
  texture {
    pigment { color rgb 1 }
    finish{ reflection { 0.5 / 3 } }
  }
  texture {
    pigment { color rgbt 1 }
    finish{ reflection { 0.4 / 2 } }
  }
  texture {
    pigment { color rgbt 1 }
    finish{ reflection { 0.1 / 1 } }
  }
  ...