Possibly dumb question: Can renders be paused and resumed across sessions?

[dduane]

Folks -- I went searching for an answer for this, but don't seem able to find anything. (I may be searching with too low a blood caffeine level.) 

Is it possible to start a render -- then pause it -- then save and close Terragen: then open the .tgd file in question again at a later time, and resume the render from where it left off?

Thanks! -- Diane

[Dune]

I don't think so. You can stop it, save that part, but then you'd have to crop render the rest.

[domdib]

No, not at the moment. There has actually been some discussion of this as a possible future feature.

[dduane]

No, not at the moment. There has actually been some discussion of this as a possible future feature.

Well, I'd certainly vote for that. It just seems strange to me that a program that is so slick and elegant in nearly all other ways should fall down on this particular issue. (I wouldn't be surprised at all if there was some complex technical issue that was making it difficult, and I wouldn't mind being told what that was.)

I'm feeling the bite of this particularly at the moment as I just recently became the proud owner of a very lovely custom-built overclocked 2-core machine, and I had these images of one-hour renders dancing in my head... and lo, the machine is still doing these 10- or 20-hour stints (well, OK, the renders are complex...) during which there is really need to shut the machine down for one reason or another, and I can't.   It gets frustrating sometimes. Or, I could, but I'm going to wind up having to do all these cropped renders to work around it. ...And not everybody has a fast machine, so such people are going to have an even greater need to turn the thing off occasionally (laptop rendering, anybody?) and come back to a piece of work later. A "resume-later" button on the Render window would seem like a godsend.

-- DD

[domdib]

I'd be keen on it too, as I can't render for longer than 8 hours at a stretch. However, crop rendering isn't so much of an issue as it used to be for me, as any inconsistencies in lighting between crops are dealt with quite well by Microsoft's free panorama stitcher, ICE - see http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/ICE/

[Henry Blewer]

I have not had any issues merging crop render together. It's a good way to free up the computer to do other stuff. I would really rather have the ability to stop and resume a render later than say the 64 bit version.

[Oshyan]

Saving render progress and resuming later is an often requested feature, but it's somewhat complicated to implement, which is why it hasn't made it in yet.

If you need to shut down your computer, just use Sleep or Hibernate, but keep TG2 open. When you resume your computer you can resume rendering. Is there a reason you need to actually shut your computer down?

- Oshyan

[treddie]

Not to interrupt here, but I was doing a render with another program that was rendering as I slept.  A power surge occurred and my UPS can't handle the load for this quad machine.  So it just shut down after about 6 hours of render time.  But because that program updates a huge HDR file every 20 minutes or so and can resume, I did not lose those 6 hours, but I DID lose the last 2 hours since my machine went down.  So I DEFINITELY VOTE for a badly needed resume feature, because if it had been a TG2 render, I would have lost the complete 8 hours and if it had been a job for a client, I could possibly have fallen behind on a business deadline.

[Artistico]

I see this still is not implemented, and I understand it is a tricky thing, but implementing a way to save the image at set intervals or enable the image to be saved when the rendering is paused should be easy, though, right? In the event of a crash, one might then crop render what remains of the work and stitch later. It is certainly on my wish list even though I've yet to experience any hair-tearing cases of crashing after a few days (or weeks) of rendering.

[Oshyan]

We'll consider that as a short-term possibility.

- Oshyan