Saving and resuming the state of an Iray Render?

Stretch65

I don't suppose it's possible to somehow save the state of a currently running iray render and resume it another day?  I'm guessing not - but it would be awesome.

TimberWolf

Yes, but it's part of Windows 10/11 functionality rather than Studio. When rendering, hit cancel but don't close anything down. This leaves Studio in the state of being able to resume the render and at this point you have three options - shut your computer down using sleep, hybrid sleep or hibernate. You might not have the hibernate option which is the one you really want as it's primarily for laptops and many desktop motherboards don't support it but it copies the memory in use to disk, switches off completely and then resumes exactly as you left it having used no electricity.

Sleep stores everything into RAM, powers down, but uses some electricity to preserve the memory state. If you suffer a power interruption during this time then it's game over.

Your PC (if you're using a Mac or an earlier version of Win, I haven't a clue!) will probably support hybrid sleep which does both - copies data to both disk and to memory. This starts faster and, in the event of a power-cut will still work as it can retrieve the machine's state from the disk instead.

Both sleep options will increase your electricity useage but unless you're leaving your PC for weeks on end shouldn't be really noticeable.

All of this can be found and enabled/disabled in the settings menu under 'Power' (who'd have thought?!). Most PCs will have the option to enter hybrid sleep with a simple touch of the power button if you enable it.

Power your machine back up when you want to carry on and hit Resume on the render window.

Stretch65

Many thanks.  I appreciate your in-depth answer.