Question

The message:

terminate called after throwing an instance of 'std::bad_alloc'
what():  std::bad_alloc

I looked at the gdb backtrace and this is the lowest level method in there that I implemented myself:

/*
 * get an array of vec3s, which will be used for rendering the image
 */
vec3 *MarchingCubes::getVertexNormalArray(){
    // Used the same array size technique as getVertexArray: we want indices to match     up
    vec3 *array = new vec3[this->meshPoints.getNumFaces() * 3]; //3 vertices per face

    int j=0;
    for (unsigned int i=0; i < (this->meshPoints.getNumFaces() * 3); i++) {
        realVec normal = this->meshPoints.getNormalForVertex(i);
 //     PCReal* iter = normal.begin();

        if (normal.size() >= 3) {
            array[j++] = vec3(normal[0], normal[1], normal[2]);
        }
        cout << i << " ";
    }

    return array;
}

The cout statement you see above indicates that it terminates after 7000+ iterations.
The above function is called only once near the end of my application. I call a very similar function before calling the above, that doesn’t cause problems.

Answer 1

My problem turned out to be that this->meshPoints.getNormalForVertex(i) accesses an array (or vector, I can’t remember) whose length is less than this->meshPoints.getNumFaces() * 3. So it was accessing out of bounds.