Annoying Lightflow Crash w/interiors

Coding Python Support
1

I am wondering if anyone can ponder this and come up with an answer. I am working on this material, glass with airbubbles in it (the bubbles are pretty much the same material with IOR 1.0) and it crashes every time I try to render any scene containing the material. Here is a copy of the code.

Air = s.newMaterial(“standard”,[
“ka” , vector3( 0.00000 , 0.00000 , 0.00000) ,
“kc” , vector3( 1.00000 , 1.00000 , 1.00000) ,
“kr” , vector3( 0.12000 , 0.12000 , 0.12000) ,
“kt” , vector3( 1.00000 , 1.00000 , 1.00000) ,
“kd” , 0.03000 ,
“km” , 0.20000 ,
“ksg” , 0.30000 ,
“caustics” , 0 , 0 ,
“shadowing” , 0.12000
])

Borb = s.newPattern(“bubbles”,[
“scale” , 0.70000 ,
“turbulence.amount” , 0.00000
])

ender = s.newPattern(“multifractal”,[
])

few = s.newPattern(“sub”,[
“patterns” , Borb , ender
])

PrinceChopper = s.newInterior(“hyper”,[
“material” , Air ,
“density” , few
])

s.interiorBegin(PrinceChopper)
BubblyGlass = s.newMaterial(“standard”,[
“ka” , vector3( 0.00000 , 0.00000 , 0.00000) ,
“kc” , vector3( 0.95000 , 1.00000 , 0.95000) ,
“kr” , vector3( 0.00000 , 0.10000 , 0.00000) ,
“kt” , vector3( 1.00000 , 1.00000 , 1.00000) ,
“kd” , 0.05000 ,
“km” , 0.20000 ,
“ksg” , 0.30000 ,
“IOR” , 1.30000 ,
“transmission” , 1 ,
“caustics” , 2 , 2
])

s.interiorEnd()

That’s all the source from the material. I am using MatSpiderLF for this. I experienced crashes in both MatSpider and a scene I exported from blender including this material. They both crash after about 10 percent is completed. One theory I have is that the trace-depth necessary to render the material exceeds the trace depth set in the interface, although I could be wrong about this. If there are any real lightflow experts out there (eeshlo?) who know the answer, I would be glad to hear it! A possible clue is that the shadowing parameter on the air material is ignored by the ‘hyper’ interior…it defaults back to 1.0. I don’t know if this is relevant. Do I need to enable caching on the interior? Sorry about the odd names for materials and patterns, I do that so if I use a lot of previously created materials from MatSpider I won’t have a problem with duplicate names… I don’t get any error message from lightflow during the rendering either. It just crashes.

2

Lightflow has its bugs, some things cannot be changed. The ‘hyper’ interior seems to be very buggy, at least in the windows version. The ‘hyperblob.py’ Lightflow example file immediately crashes when using windows, but not in Linux. I have found a few other bugs too, one of which is rather unfortunate since I almost added a ‘new’ option to Lightflow (with the actual great help of Jacopo), but that failed in the end too due to a LF bug… :frowning:

3

where is he and why has he gone silent?

4

I don’t know where he is or why he is silent. He was very friendly and explained the things I needed to know very well. I actually expected to never get a reply at all, but I got a reply almost immediatly, but that’s more than a month ago now, I asked him some other questions which he also answered and also said that I always could ask any questions I might have. But at some point I never got a reply anymore. Of course there might be personal circumstances or something we don’t know about. Or maybe he decided to lock himself up in a cabin in the woods and not come out until he once and for all finishes the next version of Lightflow, but somehow I think that is not very likely…