Is it possible to Resume a render?

Ryuu@AMcCF

Okay, before anyone can be mean and says "yes" or "no" and runs away without telling how, I know we have all get started renders that get interrupted for one reason or another.

Most times, the stops are for legit reasons, such as glaring errors of the scene setup forcing us to go back into the scene to fix and restart from scratch--and we've all seen those three little buttons at the bottom of the Render window: the grayed out "Resume", "Save", "Cancel". We hit "Close", and after confirming we want to to stop, the "Cancel" changes to "Close", and the "Resume" is now lit up to show that is a viable option.

And so long as we don't hit "Close" or "Save", that "Resume" option is available (that we almost NEVER make use of it)--and yes, there has been a few times I've taken that option, and it DOES work (BTW--this fact is featured as this year's top entry for Ripply's Believe It Or Not), although I can honestly say those occassions can be counted on one hand.

 

Okay, so here's the reason I'm asking:

What if we're in the middle of a very long render--and it's going great, but we have to shut down my machine before the work can complete... like due to environmental situations like protecting the machine from thunderstorms or other reasons.

Is there any way we can recall THAT LAST EFFORT and resume it after we saved the unfinished render!? Or are we pretty much Mulch Out Of Luck and simply have to restart from scratch?

 

Thanks in advance for any advice.

 

Post pre-edited before Richard Haseltine has to on September 30

crosswind

If you fully shut down the computer (Power Off), you'll have no way to resume the render. The only way is :- 1) Do not close the Render window; 2) Sleep or Hibernate mode; 3) No outage!  Then when you get back, Resume.

Ryuu@AMcCF

Yeah, that was what I was afraid of. I was hoping there was a secret backdoor way of resuming an interrupted render from where I had to shut down the machine.

Thanks for the info.

ShelLuser

There might be a way if you're using a client/server setup. LuxRender for example allowed for this: the render client would contact the server, upload all the data and then the server got to work. But because it kept writing its readied data after every cycle you could easily shut it down, and when the process eventually restarted it would resume where it left off.

So it can be done, though probably not in the way you're imagining it, setting up a dedicated server for all this quite a different task.

Still, the reason I mention this is because I keep reading things about Iray also providing a client/server setup somewhere (I haven't looked into this), but if that is the case then it might provide you with a possible solution.

 

prixat

It may be time to give the official Iray Server another try. No mention of charges anywhere on the website! Haven't found any announcements but it seems to be free now.

The server has all the queuing, stop and resume functions you want.

So far, an RTX 3060 seems to be enough to let it work in the background while I'm working in Studio with the Iray preview!!!!