POV-Ray

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.

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.

Mosaic preview display didn’t work as expected, given these command line options: +sp64 +ep16. The preview was solid colored instead of the coarse preview that you’d expect.

I’ve tested a fix to unix/disp_sdl.cpp from clipka and it appears to work.

When using “filter all VALUE” with an image_map using a 4-bit (16-color) paletted bmp image, debug builds of POV-Ray fail with an assertion.

According to code analysis, other paletted image formats with <256 palette entries are also likely to be affected; similar assertion fails can be expected when using the “filter INDEX, VALUE” feature on such files with an index exceeding the palette size. “transmit” shows the same flaws.

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?

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.

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.

Request an #ELSEIF statement in POV SDL.

Request #BREAK statement inside #WHILE and #FOR loops.

In POV SDL it can sometimes be ambiguous what exactly a macro returns. An explicit #RETURNS statement would make this unambiguous.

Currently, arrays may contain only one object type. Would be nice to eliminate this restriction and allow arrays to contain objects of different types.

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.

It would be nice to configure an INI option to add render information like render time, date, and input file to output images.

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.

There already exist atan, atan2 and atan2d functions, why not atand?

Would be nice to have a “Delete” option in the File menu to delete the current file from disk.

The documentation assumes that INI files (as well as the command line!) are parsed and processed instantly. This no longer holds true for POV-Ray 3.7, where parsing INI files (and the command line) and processing it are separate operations that occur at different times. As such, one consequence is that INI file options only take effect after reading the whole INI file, and possibly later.

As such, documentation statements such as <http://www.povray.org/documentation/view/3.6.1/222/>
“Note: that these options take effect immediately when specified. Obviously any error or warning messages that might occur before the option is read will not be affected.”

Are no longer correct. It needs to be explained that options only take effect after the INI file has been read. An error in the INi file causes other options _not_ to take effect because reading of the INi file is aborted prematurely.

The ability to specify an exact name for output images during animations would be great. As it is, POV-Ray appends a numerical designation to each image (e.g. image001.png, image002.png, etc. Overriding this behavior would allow certain tasks to be accomplished without cluttering the hard drive. For instance, an image could be rendered over and over again. Certain things like cellular automata, ripple tank simulations and feedback fractals could be performed without the resulting long list of images in a given directory.

The command line option could be in the form of +oefile/+Output_File_Name_Exact=file or some such.

Macros are finicky about how you type your code. What works outside macros sometimes fails inside them. For more information see the threads:

“Problems with macro (3.6)”, in p.a-u, 06-09-10
“Bad operands”, in p.g, 05-20-10

Still not sure *what* exactly the problem was, but one of my workarounds ended up working.

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

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.

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?

Currently, cameras placed inside object or union statements will halt the render with an error. Take for instance the following case:

#local temp_camera_1 = camera
{
  orthographic
  location  z*-12
  direction  z
  up    y
  right    x*image_width/image_height
  scale    32
}

#local temp_light_1 = light_source
{
  0
  color rgb 1
  translate <-30, 30, -30>
}

#local temp_light_2 = light_source
{
  0
  color rgb 1
  translate <-30, 30, +30>
}

union
{
  object {temp_light_1}
  object {temp_light_2}
//  camera {temp_camera_1}  // doesn't work!!!
}

//object {temp_camera_1}  // doesn't work!!!
camera {temp_camera_1}  // works!!!

Changing this behavior would make it possible to more easily apply transformations to scene objects and the camera at the same time in situations where the scene’s frame of reference is in motion relative to the rest of the scene, for instance in animations.

clipka anonymous@anonymous.org wrote:
> Am 29.06.2010 04:27, schrieb jberry02:
>
> > First, note that this is the Windows version.
> > Second the issue is not with opening the ini file, but with opening the scene
> > file from within the ini file.
> >
> > I have a scene.ini file, that has a line:
> >
> > Input_File_Name=scene
> >
> > under POV-Ray 3.5 *and* POV-Ray 3.6, the scene defined in the file scene.pov is
> > rendered properly using the parameters specified in the scene.ini file. The ini
> > file is opened from the POV-Ray GUI, and run using the “Run” button.
> >
> > under POV-Ray 3.7, I get an error - I originally thought that it was simply not
> > looking for scene.pov (i.e., it wasn’t adding the .pov extension when trying to
> > open the scene file), but looking closer the error is *actually*:
> >
> > Input file ‘C:\[...]\scene’ not found; cannot determine I/O permission for
> > write.
> > Failed to start render: Cannot open file.
> >
> > In other words, it appears that the problem is that it isn’t adding the default
> > ..pov extension when it is trying to do the I/O permission check. I do not have
> > any special I/O permisssions configured for any version of POV-Ray (I get the
> > pop-up dialogs), and this is a change in behavior from 3.6 to the current beta
> > of 3.7. The scene.pov file is not in any of the POV-Ray directories - it is in
> > a separate tree where I keep my scene files.
>
> Having looked at it in a debugger, I can confirm that there is a
> problem, and that you don’t seem to be far off the mark:
>
> The error occurs when POV-Ray tries to determine the I/O permissions for
> the /output/ file. If that isn’t explicitly specified with a path,
> POV-Ray will try to get the path from the input file; however, it will
> take the unprocessed parameter (in the sample case “scene”) rather than
> the file name POV-Ray makes of it (”scene.pov”), and then attempts to
> get the full /long/ path name of the file (remember the good old 8.3
> filenames for compatibility with 16-bit programs?), which only works
> when the file exists.
>
> Would you mind submitting a bug report to <http://bugs.povray.org>?

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 ?

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

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

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

System: Win7 x64, 3.7 Beta 38

value is erroneously clipped to the range 0..1 before being displayed

Test bug for checking features of flyspray.

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.