[tuhopuu-devel] Report for Tuhopuu and Aqsis

[Jonathan Merritt]

Hi,

> Hello, I made a compilation, and now the proportion is good, thanks.
> I have perhaps found a bug and have a question:
> - for the bug: when press EscKey during the render, Blender freeze and 
> the only things to unfreeze es to make Ctrl-C in the console, I think 
> Blender wait for a message of Aqsis but I'm not sure...


To my knowledge, pressing EscKey normally sets a flag which can be 
checked using a function called RE_local_test_break().  If this function 
returns non-zero then the render has been cancelled.  (That's how I 
think it works, anyway. :-)

Currently, the RenderMan renderers "block" Blender's execution when they 
are running: ie: Blender simply waits for them to finish.  Hence, the 
only way to stop their execution is directly from the console as you 
describe.  EscKey will probably have no effect because I doubt Blender 
will even have received the event, since it will be blocked on a 
system() call (or the Windoze equivalent).

The *ideal* situation would be to allow the renderers to run in a 
non-blocking fashion, and allow Blender to continue to poll for the 
EscKey.  If the EscKey were then received, the renderer processes could 
be killed by Blender itself and control returned to the user.  This 
would make everything much more interactive.

Does anyone know how this sort of thing could be done?  If anyone knows 
of a good tutorial for achieving this behavior under Linux and Windows 
then I'll make it a top priority.  My own experiments, using popen(), 
weren't very successful.

> - When a mesh contains non-manifold topology, if we render with Aqsis, 
> Blender crash, it is possible to display a message to say that is 
> impossible to render with Aqsis?


Hmmm... :-(  Rendering non-manifold subdivs shouldn't cause Blender to 
crash - at least not under Linux.  Maybe there's something else going 
wrong?  The only problem I have at my end with the motor9.blend file are 
the non-manifold surfaces, so I can't really investigate what might be 
causing Blender itself to crash.

We had discussed providing warnings about non-manifold surfaces, but at 
least under Linux, Aqsis itself provides this warning without causing a 
crash, so it wasn't a top priority.

It looks like we need developers who are running these different 
platforms to be able to test out some of these things.

-- 
Jonathan Merritt.
PhD Student - Equine Biomechanics.
Equine Centre, The University of Melbourne,
Werribee, Victoria, Australia.