To begin with, I wasn't able to reproduce the bug by hand, and
since it appears when using my Particle-System, I guess it
has something to do with some memory leaks or such, but I'll explain...

So, I've got a 1.4GHZ Athlon, 512 MB RAM, Win98, using
Beta 13.

The bug didn't occur formerly when using Beta 12 and the ones
before, but I'll see later if it appears there too.

So, I'm tracing a 250 frame, 320x240 animation, when suddenly
the media-objects appear black. There are 239 particles (each one
only a media-sphere), one additional media-sphere as an emitter,
and a little mesh made of 6 triangles to make a corner for a room.
The only lightsource is a fade_power one, centered in the
media-sphere-emitter.

I tried to let POV-Ray simply render the remaining frames. Then,
seemingly be random, either all the particles (if placed inside a union
or not does not matter), or the single emitter, or both, appear
sometimes
properly, sometimes black, and sometimes it appears that I can see the
media and only the background-color through the object in which
the media is contained.

My Particle-System does not use I/O, and I've checked all sorts
of textures. Even when setting the default texture to a transparent
one (which would be useful for media), it seems that the objects
are simply traced with the default total-black texture.

Anti-Aliasing doesn't help either, it seems that POV-Ray regards
objects either as fully black, or media, or media-on-background,
or working properly, but no jags or in-between any of those four
possibilities.

The particles are placed using a macro, but even when using an
object-declaration, it occurs, and when using one single blob (with
particles represented by spherical) components, it pops up.

This seems a severe media-bug, and I'm doing all I can to actually
close in on what's messing things up. If anyone has suggestions on
how to proceed, I'd be grateful. If there is need, I can also ZIP the
particle-system along with the scene.

So, comments, suggestions and hints could be pretty useful.

I'll go ahead now and try if it occurs with Beta 12, perhaps that'll
help a bit.

--
Tim Nikias
Homepage: http://www.digitaltwilight.de/no_lights/index.html

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