"melo" <mel### [at] coxnet> wrote in message 
news:web.47bd191c1f639ab3587ef5e20@news.povray.org...
> After all the feedback and pointers I had gotten, and countless hours I 
> had
> invested, I was able to get my animation looking smooth enough, no jumping 
> back
> to default pose between FRAMES, I could remember where the last pose was 
> and
> continue from there on.  Well, what was left to correct my pose files.
>
> Well, first step pose file was done, and just then as I thought I was on a 
> roll,
> POV-RAY crashed, It could not even render frame_number = 1, it displayed
> and errror window saying:
>
>    "The POV_Ray core rendering code threw an unhandled exception.
>
>     The backend thread has been shut down and you will not be able to
>     perform any further renders.
>
>    (Note that if internal structures have been damaged POV-Ray may crash
>    immediately,..
>
> Well. POV-RAY did not crash immediately, however message window did not 
> contain
> any further insights that might help me to come up with a work around 
> despite
> my countless debugging statements.
>
> I am working on a DELL dual core , under Win Vista Home Premium O/S.
>
> Is there  listserve dedicated to reporting system crashes?
>
> Thanks,
> Meltem

Doh! I hate it when that happens.

Once you've determined the precise cause of the crash it could go on 
povray.bugreport, if indeed it is an outstanding bug. In my experience, 
determining the precise cause is often tricky. There have been times when 
I've not been able to determine an exact cause, but I've suspected that it 
could be just a duff character in the scene file (effectively a corrupt 
file).

There are a number of techniques I've used in the past for 
isolating/fixing/working around this sort of a problem. The first thing I'd 
recommend is to take a back up copy of your files, because the techniques 
involve hacking chunks out of the files until the problem goes away and you 
will want to keep a record of how your files look now so that you can 
selectively paste bits back in to rebuild to the current state (but without 
the corruption).

Presumably other files render ok (e.g. the standard POV-Ray test scenes) - 
you may need to restart POV-Ray each time after you get an error like this. 
Presumably your problem is still present when you suppress the animation 
command line options and revert to a single image render.

If you have a recent backup of your work you may care to load up a copy and 
check it still renders.

Then it's down to either chopping large sections out of the scene file until 
you get something that doesn't throw the error, or starting from a blank 
file and copying large sections in until you detect the problem. Once you've 
isolated a section of SDL containing the problem you should be able to chop 
that down and repeat the process until you isolate the offending 
line/character. The ideal initial chunk size is half the file, but you need 
to pick a chunk that will render in isolation. By chopping the offending 
section in half you can usually isolate the bad line suprisingly quickly.

If you determine that it's nothing to do with the animation features you 
could post a question on povray.general to reach a wider audience. Maybe 
someone in the broader POV-Ray community has a better technique for 
isolating these problems.

If you can isolate the problem into a relatively small/understandable 
section of SDL, you could maybe post it on povray.binaries.scene-files to 
see if the problem is reproducable on other platforms. If it's not 
reproducable then the developers would stand little chance of implementing 
any future fixes.

Regards,
Chris B.

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