My latest headaches
Okay, here’s the deal. Getting POV-Ray and Moray to work properly on Vista is a nightmare. Until now, things worked more or less, but not as good as on XP. Creating scenes and rendering them from Moray worked, but I had to close POV-Ray every time before rendering or everything would freeze. Annoying, but not too much trouble. Rendering animations in POV-Ray didn’t work, however. Normally, you set a clock variable, wich you use to create your animation, and then all frames are rendered automatically. Guess what? Doesn’t work! The program crashes when I try it. Only solution is rendering everything frame by frame.
So today I wanted to continue working on my graphics, Moray simply doesn’t work anymore at all! The only thing that still works is creating scenes directly in POV-Ray, wich is an incredibly time consuming process. Unless I can find a way to solve this problem, I’m going back to vector graphics after my current project. With some effort, these can be made to look 3D-ish, and sometimes even better than pre-rendered sprites.

January 5th, 2008 at 8:23 pm
Hey Mr. Biscuit.
I found this entry after searching for the solution to my own frustrations. What version of POV-Ray are you using? Moray?
The problem isn’t with Vista (most likely). The issue is that Moray hasn’t been updated to export POV-Ray 3.6 files, therefore 3.6 hangs after the first render. I beat my head on the wall over this, and the solution is to downgrade POV-Ray to 3.5. Sorry, but it’s the only way.
Since Lutz and Kretzchmar have given Moray to the POV-Ray team, it’s up to the team to dive into Moray and rebuild it to their specs before they can release a code update to enable 3.6 support.
Helpful links follow:
http://news.povray.org/moray.win/thread/%3Cweb.472e28073cfd2ff5e361d01d0%40news.povray.org%3E/
ftp://ftp.povray.org/pub/povray/Old-Versions/Official-3.5/Windows/
Cheers!
January 17th, 2008 at 5:40 am
Hi,
thank you for the tip. Unfortunately, it didn’t solve my problem. It’s even worse now, POV-Ray freezes as soon as it starts. The weird thing is, it works perfectly on a computer running XP, so my best guess is that Vista is to blame. Ah, well, I’m gonna try modeling in Moray and then exporting the POV-file for rendering. Not really an elegant solution but it should work.