Maybe the LGM's vaporized part of your spaceship...

I'd appreciate a copy of the .mdl file that causes the problem/crash.  I
can run in the debugger and track down the problem.  [There's a reason
it says "beta" at the top of the docs...]

I tend to make pretty simple scenes to test specific aspects of the
code.  This means that I'll tend to miss interactions that happen in
other circumstances.  Comments, both good and bad, will help clean
things up.

Johannes Hubert wrote:
> 
> Hi!
> 
> When testing the AnimPlugin I ran into unexpected problems:
> ...
> 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 :-)

Sounds pretty straightforward.

> 
> 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:

The preview really ought to match the rendered output.  However, due to
the way I manage the scene during the generation of the animation, there
are plenty of ways that it might not.  Especially for CSG'd objects (I
thought I'd cleaned that up - guess not.)

> 
> 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 :(

That's very bad.  It probably means I'm trashing memory somewhere.  The
really distressing part is the rendering is being done in a separate
thread and shouldn't be able to crash Moray.

> 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 :-)

Stills are actually generated in a slightly different way than the
animation.  The stills are generated by moving the objects within Moray,
then exporting the entire scene and rendering.

When animating, I export the entire scene, along with the keyframe
information.  Once everything is copied out of Moray, I use the keyframe
information to move the objects around.  There are many more places for
the animation process to go wrong.

Xander

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