POV-Ray

Scenes starting with the incorrect syntax

version 3.7;

do not raise an error, instead they render a black screen with an empty scene warning.
#version should fail with an error when the # is missing.

Windows 7, Home Premium 64bit
In Options/Editor Window/Editor Preferences/Language Tabs
saving a tab size of 4 does not work - on restart it reverts to the default of 8

In Options/Editor Window/Editor Preferences/Misc
saving a Line numbering style of Decimal and a Start number of 1, does not work, on restart the defaults are restored.

When I try to re-render the insert menu bitmaps,on the Windows version 3.7b36 there is an error with the
Shapes.pov file.
line 474: Parse Error: Unexpected additional ‘.’ in floating-point number

line 474 is:

<2.6, 0>, <3.6.9>, <4, 1.1>, <3.4, 2>, <3, 1>, <2, 1>

The second vector has two decimal points
Change to <3.6,.9>

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 #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.

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

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.

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.

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 ?

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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!”

...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.