Pause/Resume Option?

[buzzzzz]

Hi,

Was thinking back when I played around with Bryce5 that it had a pause/resume option which I found very useful. What you could do was: lets say, if there was a Thunderstorm moving in and there's always a chance of losing power. You could pause the render, shut down your computer and then later after the storm passed you could restart, open your Bryce Project and resume rendering right where you left off. To me this would be an invaluable option.

What do you think?

Jay

[edlo]

Yes!! that would be greeeat man.

[MeltingIce]

This would be awesome because I've had so many renders crash, but I feel like its more random so if I could save the progress of my render and try again from a certain point that would awesome.

[odd]

..the option to save the image created so far and then hit resume would also be very useful...to show a client what you have so-far.

Also - being able to pause and then zoom in/out of the rendered image would be very cool. I.E a quick way to check if details look alright on huge renders. At the moment I have to save my 4500x2250pixel image to disk and then load it into photoshop in order to zoom in and check my crop render to see that it looks alright...done so some 25 times now the past hour... 

//O.

[Oshyan]

This would definitely be a great feature and I hope we'll be able to include it in the final release. For now what you can do is rely on crop renders. If you're about half way through a render and you need to stop (due to thunder storms for example) you can abort the render, save the current progress, then just use a crop render next time to only render the unfinished part. This can be problematic with global illumination currently, causing seams (differences in lighting between crops). But this problem should be addressed in the future, and if GI is not in use the joins should generally work quite well.

- Oshyan

[David Burnett]

Of course it you've got a hibernate / safe sleep option, the one that writes memory to disk, you could pause, hibernate then wake and continue :-)

Now if only hibernate worked on Desktops ;-)

[Al_frog]

I would say that some sort of save/resume option is really a necessity for those of us not in a commercial environment and in outlying areas.  I have had 5 electrical outages of 2 to over 5 hours in the last week and winter has just got underway. There have been many short flickers that shut down the machine. Others not a block from here have been out for more than a day.  A good many of the outages here are too long for UPS especially if running any extra render nodes.  And the render times have gotten to be quite long so it is just much more important to avoid wasted time.
     It would indeed be nice to have an automatic save option that could be set to save every so many minutes (user set) and that then deletes the oldest SAVE of whatever selected number is set.  Having more than one back up may not prove to be useful, but then again it might.

[Dark Fire]

I agree - the ability to pause and close Terragen is a must for non-commercial enviromnents as renders take forever in T2TP when trying to render a top-quality image.

[Oshyan]

It's certainly something we would like to implement, I just don't know how difficult it will be to do so. I actually haven't seen a feature like this in many renderers, although there are certainly a number of notable examples. If it's possible to add this feature with a reasonable amount of development time we'll certainly do so.

- Oshyan

[Ricowan]

The only applications I've seen this feature in have all been scanline renderers.  They just read in the partial file from disk, then continue rendering where the file data ends.  Obviously, this isn't possible in Terragen, since it doesn't render top down, one pixel at a time.  Information other than image data would have to be saved somehow.

If anyone is really worried, an inexpensive UPS would (in my opinion) be a better solution. 

Rich
[edited for spelling]

[Dark Fire]

It probably would be a difficult feature to implement, which is probably why it is so rare. However, it would offer such a large range of benifits: automatic backup of partial-renders in case of crashes, the ability to zoom into large partially-rendered pictures, and the ability to show clients current progress.

[Bluefinger]

Wait.... today, I paused TGD's render so I could have a go at Garry's Mod. Either that you are all using the free version, and that doesn't have that feature and the Deep version has it, or have I just managed to notice the "Pause" button in the top left corner, right next to save. Or perhaps I've got the wrong end of the stick, and you all mean a pause button that you can save the incomplete render, then come back later and continue the render?

[Ricowan]

Yes, they're looking for a way to stop a render part way through, save it, then come back to it later (after a re-boot, etc).

[Dark Fire]

Yes - while the pause button is a nice improvement, renders could already be paused in the old Terragen using a number of methods. We are looking for a more powerful pause that enables Terragen to resume a render is was doing the last time we were running it.

By the way, the pause button is in every version of T2TP (including the free one).

[Incognitas]

I have to say I would find thisa very useful addition.It's saved my sanity more than a few times in Bryce.