Pause Rendering

[Andy Broomell]

It would be helpful to be able to pause a rendering, without canceling, and then be able to resume. This might be a button in the Viewport's OIP.

 

For example, after starting a high-quality, high-resolution render on a laptop, here are some times when pausing might be handy:

• A while later you need to travel somewhere else with the laptop, but don't want to lose what's already been rendered and waste that time. You could pause it, close the laptop, travel, open laptop and continue rendering.
• While rendering, you're working on another project in VW. You need to do a brief render to be able to check something and keep working. But the viewport won't render until the high-res render in the other file is finished. So you could pause that one, render your current project, then resume the other one.
• While rendering, you need to do some other processor-intensive task. So you pause the VW rendering, do your thing, then continue the rendering.

 

I'm sure there are other examples, but the three above all happened to me in the past week. The studio I'm working in is a very fast-paced, multi-tasking, constantly-changing type of atmosphere, so any control we have over processes like this is helpful.

[Matt Overton]

On 29/06/2017 at 6:47 AM, Andy Broomell said:

It would be helpful to be able to pause a rendering, without canceling, and then be able to resume. This might be a button in the Viewport's OIP.

 

For example, after starting a high-quality, high-resolution render on a laptop, here are some times when pausing might be handy:

• A while later you need to travel somewhere else with the laptop, but don't want to lose what's already been rendered and waste that time. You could pause it, close the laptop, travel, open laptop and continue rendering.
• While rendering, you're working on another project in VW. You need to do a brief render to be able to check something and keep working. But the viewport won't render until the high-res render in the other file is finished. So you could pause that one, render your current project, then resume the other one.
• While rendering, you need to do some other processor-intensive task. So you pause the VW rendering, do your thing, then continue the rendering.

 

I'm sure there are other examples, but the three above all happened to me in the past week. The studio I'm working in is a very fast-paced, multi-tasking, constantly-changing type of atmosphere, so any control we have over processes like this is helpful.

I think the advice you'll get from VW here would be along the lines of using service select to send the long running render to the cloud and get on with other work.

Which of cause brings up a parallel wish for subscribers to be able to push a render to the cloud then import it (or have it magically appear) back in the file so project files can stay together. Better still if from a button on Object Info. Better still if we if rendering had say a preview fast render before dispatching the longer job.

 

Still, pausing would also be handy for overnight rendering if we could line up a bunch of renders pause them then have them un-pause one as the last one finishes instead of having them all competing for the processor and slowing all of them down with context switching.