New Gradient "Surface Thickness" Crashes

[WizCraker]

I understand that you have to turn on Trace Transparency in the Rendering Options and also have it a double sided surface. But I think that if you forget to turn on these settings that it should come up with proper Error Handling in Lightwave so it does not crash the program. Of course that is just an observation for architecting user friendly code.

I keep getting this in the crash box.

Faulting application lightwav.exe, version 0.0.0.0, faulting module lightwav.exe, version 0.0.0.0, fault address 0x000e2807.

And this from the debug window

Unhandled exception at 0x004e2807 in lightwav.exe: 0xC0000005: Access violation reading location 0x00000000.

Instead of the crash, there should be a message like:

Need to turn on Trace Transparency and make sure the surface is Double Sided for surface thickness to work.

[Mylenium]

Mmmh, sounds strange. Never experienced such a thing.

Mylenium

[Marcus]

I have the same problem.
In 7.5b LW was not chrashing if you forgot to turn on Trace Transparency.
If you disable the gradient the rendering popup and freeze.

Marcus

[kleinaa]

This little bug cost me about 4 hours of time trying to figure out what was happening.

Another funny thing to note... If you are baking an object in your scene, the application will not crash even if transparency is turned off. Transparency is rendered regardless.

Things seem fine until you turn of baking.

This is quite a bummer, however I am glad that someone posted this thread. This is the solution I was looking for.

I am using 7.5c win XP. Same results... application crash if transparency turned off using thickness gradient.

I wont forget this little piece of information again :(

[KillMe]

damn i assumed this was jsut broken lol been wondering if itwas just me then on a whim today i searched to see if i was the onyl one with this prob

great stuff got a project for it already infact

[mattclary]

This info saved my butt! I had a scene that was working fine, created a new scene with the same object and LightWave would crash whenever I tried to render. I was able to troubleshoot it down to the particular surface and particular channel. If I switched the gradient to something other than Surface Thickness, it worked fine. Once I determined I couldn't make it work, I came here, did a search and voila! I had not turned on Trace Transparency! Everything is right in the world again! :)