Continuing render after computer crash?

[daudvyd]

Hi folks, is there any way to start a render so that it can be continued if the computer crashes or needs to be shut down? I recently lost a very large complex render that had been running for 50 hours.

[WAS]

Unfortunately not currently though if I remember correctly this was on the road map for some point in the future. No timeframe I don't think.

[cyphyr]

If you set your scene up to render in tiles you can at least start the render from the last tile to render. This has to be done through the command line (Check the win_command_line.txt for details).

[D.A. Bentley (SuddenPlanet)]

If you set your scene up to render in tiles you can at least start the render from the last tile to render. This has to be done through the command line (Check the win_command_line.txt for details).

Found these two options in win_command_line.txt:

-tilex <minx> <maxx>
Limit the rendered region to a fraction of the image or crop region to be rendered.
minx and maxx should be numbers between 0 and 1, where minx < maxx.
For example, "-tilex 0 0.5" renders only the left half of the image or the left half of whatever crop region was already set.
You can use both -tilex and -tiley simultaneously to define a rectangular region.


-tiley <miny> <maxy>
Limit the rendered region to a fraction of the image or crop region to be rendered.
miny and maxy should be numbers between 0 and 1, where miny < maxy.
For example, "-tiley 0 0.5" renders only the bottom half of the image or the bottom half of whatever crop region was already set.
You can use both -tilex and -tiley simultaneously to define a rectangular region.

[digitalguru]

Checkpoints might be the way to go in the future - other renderers use them and store the progressive render at various stages of completion.

I had some renders on a show that production stopped at around 80% and they looked pretty good.

[Oshyan]

Terragen doesn't currently use progressive rendering and so "checkpoints", etc. are not nearly as easy to implement. However we are moving in the direction of path tracing, which may include a progressive approach, and at that point resuming renders would be much easier to implement.

- Oshyan

[Dune]

Or make an animation of a render (without blur), where each frame does a crop, and saves automatically.

[daudvyd]

The tile switch requires a value between 0 and 1 as a percentage of the whole image. So, if I want to stitch the tiles together later, I need to compute the percentages so they come out to whole numbers (pixels) to ensure there is not a one pixel overlap between every tile--correct?

[Dune]

I guess that's easy if your total render width/height is in numbers that can be divided by the parts/percentage, not an uneven number, e.g. You can also use some overlap, especially if you don't cache your GI.

[Matt]

By default it saves the full size image (with black surrounding the tile), so you can simply add all the images together as layers, no math required. There is an option to crop the image down to just the tile, though, and that is -cropoutput