Render multiple chunks or multiple images for Animations
Yes there is probably a mod out there but I would love this feature to be present as right now I would have to launch multiple sessions of blender. In some instances I did that. The problem is if you have a longer animation sometimes cards will rest while waiting for the last chunk to be rendered. If you can tell the renderer to let each card or thread to render each their own frame instead of rendering at the same frame this could improve rendertimes.
5 Comments
I really really luv the idea! I've been working on an animation for a while and to be able to continue with the next frame while the previous one is finishing up would be awesome! It would certainly save time. The only catch for me would be that the compositor needs to be a lot faster (I know it's in the works), so those last finishing threads can handle it and continue on to the next frame etc. That would be so great - it won't save a huge amount per frame, but if you have hundreds of thousands of frames, it'll certainly make a big difference!
This is pretty easily done with a script outside of Blender that launches a separate instance for each card. I have an example script that basically does that for you. My example uses Python and bash, but if you're not on Linux, you could do it all in Python.
@Jason van Gumster: thanks for the script. I would still prefer having an onboard setting. I mean it isn't even that hard to do it manually. I did that on a project where we had a machine with 54 threads with blender render. Works smoothly.
I wish there was a setting of making a feature wish like, low priority.
@Ezydenias: Personally, I feel that adding a feature like this introduces a level of complexity to Blender that's greater than the benefit it will yield. However, let's run this rabbit and see where it goes.
Let's assume this feature is built into Blender. Where do you envision the controls for it being in Blender's interface? How would users enable or disable them? Can you provide a mock-up that shows what that might look like?
@Jason van Gumster: add a little mockup, please excuse my crude way and maybe the wording isn't the best but it gives the idea.
But I've been thinking, This might be better suited as a feature of a new official netrenderer or I rather say something compareable to cinema 4ds teamrenderer. Which cames quite handy if you can render something on all the unused PCs in the office. And in this case it would even be better if it can be decided that each gpu gets one frame and the cpu gets one aswell, even if it is slower rendering a longer animation this could be beneficial, especially since cpu and gpu are not working together. But of course that will all be set at the pc with the slave client not on the master client. Of course such a teamrenderer will have allot more features to set up so a feature like that wouldn't drown the user any much more than all the settings he has to set up anyway.