Hey All:

Mostly finished with a little scene file which renders a Mandelbrot in
3D.  It takes a while on my old iMac, but the results look pretty cool.
On hitch I'm still trying to deal with is a returned value of "NaN" from
the iteration macro.  I've searched pov.doc and failed to find what this
value means or how to handle it.  Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Sincerely,
-- Brandan

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Brandan Whearty wrote:

> Hey All:
>
> Mostly finished with a little scene file which renders a Mandelbrot in
> 3D.  It takes a while on my old iMac, but the results look pretty cool.
> On hitch I'm still trying to deal with is a returned value of "NaN" from
> the iteration macro.  I've searched pov.doc and failed to find what this
> value means or how to handle it.  Any thoughts would be appreciated.

NaN is short for "Not a Number".
There might be several things that can cause it, but most likely is that
your code are trying to divide some value with zero  (i.e. 12/0 = NaN).

That is at least what I have understood, but then again, I find it
troublesome to add one and one together. So I hope that someone will
correct me, if I'm wrong :-)

Tom Stone

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Brandan Whearty wrote:

> Hey All:
>
> Mostly finished with a little scene file which renders a Mandelbrot in
> 3D.  It takes a while on my old iMac, but the results look pretty cool.
> On hitch I'm still trying to deal with is a returned value of "NaN" from
> the iteration macro.  I've searched pov.doc and failed to find what this
> value means or how to handle it.  Any thoughts would be appreciated.
>
> Sincerely,
> -- Brandan

I've gotten that same problem with the Amiga version *and* the windows
version of POV Ray.  I never could track down the cause so I eventually
concluded that it was a C pointer error and thus beyond ny control.  As a
workaround, I added this line near the beginning of the affected scene
file:

 #declare NaN = 0;

It's lame but it worked for me.

Pete

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In article <3B4FC138.5BA056E8@bestweb.net> , p <pog### [at] bestwebnet>  wrote:

> I've gotten that same problem with the Amiga version *and* the windows
> version of POV Ray.  I never could track down the cause so I eventually
> concluded that it was a C pointer error and thus beyond ny control.  As a
> workaround, I added this line near the beginning of the affected scene
> file:

Pete,

Did you read the response from Tom Stone?  He already explained what a "NaN"
is and that it is not an error in POV-Ray but in the scene.


    Thorsten


____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich
e-mail: mac### [at] povrayorg

I am a member of the POV-Ray Team.
Visit POV-Ray on the web: http://mac.povray.org

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