Thanks Chris.

Well, in my previous working life, I used to teach and preach good software
engineering practices, one I strongly believed in was configuration/version
control.  Did I apply any of those into this mini skeletal animation personal
project?  Noo.  Can I recall, load an earlier version that did not crash
POV-RAY with most of my additions, enhancements?  Remains to be seen.

Well, how I wish I forced myself to come up with a file header that would
document  what I did since last working version.

Okay, enough self-bashing.  It is a miracle that I remember the additions since
the last working version with corrected POSE file 1.

I will keep  copy of the scene file that crashes POV-RAY.  When v4 comes out, I
will run it against it.

Chris, would you mind giving me a link to your PovPerson again?  The link I had
only had various facial renderings, and examples.  It mentioned that you used
BlobMan as the body for your PovPerson head+Face+Hair.  Now, one other
animation discussion took me to a site that had a full body walking animation
showing the POVPerson walking straight at towards you.

Now I am confused, does PovPerson has a full skeletal and skin and movement
animation, in addition to facial animation?  s/he moves much smoother than my
23 joint rotation driven skeletal.  Looks like once I get it working again, I
need to switch using spline interpolation, I am grateful you encouraged me to
use a macro to do the interpolation between poses, for each joint involved in
the move, for now I linearly changed its rotation vector from its previous
rotation vector to its current rotation vector.   Thanks to arrays, I looped
thru joints, then for each joint participating in the move, I called the the
interpolation macro.  Then when I have all the joint vectors determined as
such, I rendered the scene for that pose. Valla REPEAT FOR AS MANY POSES AS
THERE ARE FOR MOVE. For walking I have 13 Pose files.  For sitting? I shall
see.

Thanks again for taking the time to give me pointers.  Yes, this will be hard
problem to chase down.


"Chris B" <nom### [at] nomailcom> wrote:
> "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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