URGENT REQUEST ****Resume Render****

[treddie]

Please oh pretty please, Planetside, please strongly consider the importance and URGENCY of a Resume Render capability and frequent b/u capability during render time.  I have been working on some tests and let my render run all night TWICE and as luck would have it, the power surged both times and I lost everything.  If I had had a strong enough UPS to handle my 750W power supply everything would have been alright, but if the power had cut out completely for more than a few minutes with the right UPS, all would have been lost.

[AndyWelder]

I do support this request whole  heartedly.
Being able to stop and resume a render in progress would not only enable us to save a render in case of (power) emergencies but also we could transfer a render from one machine to another. Like in the case of the render that's going on on my machine now. I made an error in judging the effect of switching on ray tracing in the clouds so what was supposed to be an "overnight" render is running now for 34 hours and it's only halfway  This means my main machine is crippled. My other machine is dedicated to TG only so it doesn't matter if a render takes a week to complete, it's not interfering with my daily business.

[reck]

It would be a "nice to have" feature certainly. I would think the x64 bit update and then the animation update is going to be the main focus for the future though, so if it's not easy to implement you might not see it for a while, if ever.

[jo]

Hi,

Resumable renders are quite a frequent request. However it's not straightforward to implement or we would have done it already. I would say we will strongly consider it for a new major release as it would tie in with some other things we could do but the near term priorities are 64 bit support and the animation module.

I do understand where you're coming from. I've lived probably half my life in places where power cuts and unreliable power supply are a fact of life and I have 5 or 6 UPSes. I took me a while to figure that my previous main machine was actually drawing more power than my biggest UPS could handle, which meant I only got about 30 seconds to shut it down cleanly if the power went out.

Regards,

Jo

[AndyWelder]

Thank you , Jo. Clear answer. And so there's still the chance this feature will be implemented some time.

BTW, the render I mentioned previously was lost due to a power outage; 35 hours render time gone. *sigh*

[Goms]

Correct me if i'm wrong here, but isn't it possible to simply use a number of crop renders now, as you can choose "GI detail in camera" and put them together later?

edit: thinking about this a few seconds longer: what about saving the individual threads tg2 renders as crop images by default?
if the gi prepass is done for the whole image, for my understanding it shouldn't make any difference if you use a number of crop renders that are saved by default to combine anyway - no matter if the detail in camera is used or not. you could then, after a power outage, tell tg2 to render the prepass again but then load the crops that are done.
as it looks tg2 saves a thread that is done in the ram anyway and does not change it later; so why not save it in the ram and on hdd?

please excuse me if i'm telling a lot of bullshit here because i don't understand how tg2 works.

[Henry Blewer]

I have used crop renders. One of the last desert scenes I did had a line down the center when I combined them. I think this was because I used a 'screen' filter to combine the two crops. Every other time, I used the 'Erase' tool to remove the black area from one of the crops. It worked well doing this.