Hi!

When testing the AnimPlugin I ran into unexpected problems:

I took an old scene of mine (some large heightfields, otherwise only CSG of
standard-objects as available from inside of Moray, nothing fancy) where a
space-bug sits on a rock somewhere on a planet, with a building (sort of
planet-station) and a moon in the background.

My test was to animate the space-bug to fly from the landing-platform of the
station to its original position in the foreground.

I did so by defining three keyframes (within a 60 frames animation):

Frame 1: Bug on the platform
Frame 30: Bug halfway in the air
Frame 60: Bug at the resting position in the foreground

(BTW: Very easy to do, takes about 5min :-)

When "previewing" the animation in Moray by sliding the slider in the
Keyframe dialog by hand, everything looks fine.
However, when rendering (raytracing option) to an AVI file, some strange
(though very interesting effects) appear:

Already in the second frame, the glass-cupola that covers half of the
station vanishes. Continuously during all the frames the heightfields used
for the mountains and hills "slide" out of the picture (cool effect! ;-) and
about around frame 10-15 the part of the station that would be outside of
the glass-cupola (if that would still be there) simply vanishes, as if
"clipped by" the cupola.

Also around frame 34 or 35 Moray crashes and goes away :(

Note: The only object actually keyframed is the space-bug (a medium complex
CSG) and it seems to move correctly in the animation, despite of the other
objects behaving so strangely.

To illustrate the problems I will post the AVI (rendering stopped around
frame 30 before moray crashes) together with some still images in
povray.binaries.animations

The stills where shot by setting the slider in the Keyframe dialog to 1, 30
and 60 by hand, then rendering a still image with the Render->Render
command. As one can see, everything is fine in the stills: The cupola is
there, nothing is clipped, and the mountains did not move :-)

So long,
Johannes.

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