Hmm. I've been wanting this too, for those times when (say) you notice your drive's running out of space, and you just want to pause things, clear some space, resume. Or if I need to browse the web for something quickly and briefly.
Dare say it's not trivial to implement, though; CPU vs GPU (do you pause the CUDA stuff or just let the GPUs finish and deliver their tiles first?), edge / extreme cases (if you pause then sleep your computer, when it wakes up will you be able to reliably resume?) etc
Most of my stuff is animation, and individual frames don't tend to take longer than a few minutes, so I just stop the animation and then restart it (with "Overwrite" switched off) when needed. That doesn't help you if you need to pause mid-frame, though...
Could indicate a safer way to approach the problem, though; if you cancel a render part-way through a frame, Blender could save the render along with meta-data to record which tiles were completed. Then the next time you hit "Render", Blender can check if any scene changes have happened since the last render time, and then if there's a partially rendered frame saved and no changes have been made, load it up and start from the first incomplete tile.
This would allow for an auto-save feature for renders, too, which would be nice (especially if you have slightly crashy hardware)
4 Comments
It's already on official Cycles ToDo list. wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Source/Render/Cycles/ToDo
If any developer from BF could tell us word or two about when is Pause Render button going to come to Blender, that would be huge!
found it! developer.blender.org/T92569
Hmm. I've been wanting this too, for those times when (say) you notice your drive's running out of space, and you just want to pause things, clear some space, resume. Or if I need to browse the web for something quickly and briefly.
Dare say it's not trivial to implement, though; CPU vs GPU (do you pause the CUDA stuff or just let the GPUs finish and deliver their tiles first?), edge / extreme cases (if you pause then sleep your computer, when it wakes up will you be able to reliably resume?) etc
Most of my stuff is animation, and individual frames don't tend to take longer than a few minutes, so I just stop the animation and then restart it (with "Overwrite" switched off) when needed. That doesn't help you if you need to pause mid-frame, though...
Could indicate a safer way to approach the problem, though; if you cancel a render part-way through a frame, Blender could save the render along with meta-data to record which tiles were completed. Then the next time you hit "Render", Blender can check if any scene changes have happened since the last render time, and then if there's a partially rendered frame saved and no changes have been made, load it up and start from the first incomplete tile.
This would allow for an auto-save feature for renders, too, which would be nice (especially if you have slightly crashy hardware)