Pause Button ~ Whats it actually for?

[cyphyr]

The Pause Button, I never use it.
Since a unpausing doesn't recalculate the pre-pass a paused, then tweaked and then unpaused render doesn't give a fully accurate idea of the final out put.
So whats it for?

Richard

[jo]

If you mean the Pause button in the render window it allows you to pause the render and then resume it later. Why? That's up to you :-). Maybe you want to do something else without TG2 using all your CPU.

It's not intended to let you pause the render, change some settings and start rendering again. The fact you can change settings at all during a render and have them effect the render is kind of a mis-feature. We don't recommend it. It's a good way to crash if you try it while rendering is underway.

Regards,

Jo

[reck]

I use the pause button sometimes.

We all know how long renders can take with TG2, sometimes days. So the ability to pause the render, do something else, and then let the render continue later is important. To give you some examples when i've used it, when i've been viewing full HD video on my computer it will stutter a little bit if i'm rendering, so I pause the render, watch the video and then let the render continue after i've finished watching the video. Also sometimes I want to do something in Blender in the evening when I get home from work, if TG is rendering Blender is almost unusable for me so i'll pause the render, play with Blender for a bit and then later on when i've finished with Blender continue the render.

The pause button is useful.

[cyphyr]

Thanks for the replies guys I hadn't thought of being able to pause TG so I could do something else different as an issue. Even with the heaviest of scenes I can always use Photoshop, Firefox or even Lightwave when I'm rendering that its simply never come up, one of the advantages of having a reasonable powerful pc I guess
Richard

[N810]

Yea I have one of the faster single core pc's
So basicily if I want to do anything ealse without
serious laging of crashing I had better use the pause button. 

[Henry Blewer]

My Pentium 4 HT can do a lot of stuff at once. But when it's render time, it coughs and sputters if I through something else at it, like Blender. So the pause is a really nice feature. A feature that would be really great is the ability to stop a render, save the buffers, then continue the render later. Incendia can do this. I had a raytracer on one of my Amigas which also did this, but the program was not all that good.