Question about pausing and resuming Reality renders.

Vertigo789

I was rendering something in Reality, and I had a power outage. When I turned the PC back on, the render started from the beginning again. I'm curious, if I was to periodically make a manual backup of the scene folder, would I be able to go back to that in the event that the program is turned off irregularly again and wipes my progress?

SimonJM

LuxRender renders can be resumed, they save a 'film file' (.flm extension) every X seconds (you can specify how frequently). If that file had gone then the render cannot be resumed - you are not having the file placed under the DAZ temp directory, are you?

Vertigo789

SimonJM said:

LuxRender renders can be resumed, they save a 'film file' (.flm extension) every X seconds (you can specify how frequently). If that file had gone then the render cannot be resumed - you are not having the file placed under the DAZ temp directory, are you?

I think you misunderstood my post. The resume function works normally, but if the program doesn't shut down properly, as it did today as a result of a power outage, then it seems to wipe the render progress. I'm just wondering if making backups of the scene folder would help in that situation.

FirstBastion

What SimonJM mentions is correct, if luxrender writes a flm file on specific intervals, while it is rendering your image, it is saved to disc. (Mine are saved in a user folder) For whatever reason the render was stopped, You can resume the render with LuxRender (you don't even have to open up DAZ Studio) all the information and resources there. LuxRender just continues from the last write point.

Vertigo789

FirstBastion said:

What SimonJM mentions is correct, if luxrender writes a flm file on specific intervals, while it is rendering your image, it is saved to disc. (Mine are saved in a user folder) For whatever reason the render was stopped, You can resume the render with LuxRender (you don't even have to open up DAZ Studio) all the information and resources there. LuxRender just continues from the last write point.

Except when I tried to resume the render after the abnormal shutdown, it started from scratch, and the image file was corrupted. When I close the program properly, it resumes just fine.

SimonJM

The only thing i can think of, then, is that the shutdown happened in mid-write of the file, and thus it was corrupt not permitting LuxRender to pick up from where it left off - just bad/unlucky timing.

StratDragon

I keep my LuxRender rendering intervals to about 600 which is 10 minutes between each update and save.
so if I quit and save in LuxRender I need to manually apply the update before I quit out in order to get the most up-to-date version of the render (at least it appears to in LuxRender 1.3.1)
If your Save and Redraw interval is very thigh there is a chance if your system quits or crashes you will get a render that the progress goes back to the beginning of the interval, not the last moment before it crashed, conversely if you set the values too low your system is spending more time updating and redrawing and taking time away from rendering also the likelihood that if it does crash it will destroy the progress file which may have been in the process of being written to at the time of the crash.

Also when you re-load that file you need to go through the File>ResumeFLM and point to the .XLS and .FLM files, just going to File>Render will start over at the beginning no matter what you rendered before.

here's a screenshot of the LuxRender interface set up to save every ten minutes and redraw every one minute to see what I was talking about.