Indigo Renderer Forum

Hello!

I don't think I'm the only one that can't let his computer render for a week non-stop, and I'm really sad, when after a 6 or 9 hours render, the caustics are only starting to appear, and I have to shutdown...

I know it may be difficult, but if a resume function could be added to Indigo, I would be HAPPY!!!!!
I mean: during the render, press CTRL-P (for pause, of course ;-p), and indigo save on the hard drive it's internal state in the image directory.
Then, you can stop Indigo and do whatever you want.

The next day, you restart indigo with the same scene (and the resume option activated) and Indigo load the xml, then reload its internal state from the image dir and continue rendering as if it had not stopped.

It should be possible (WinOSI (http://www.winosi.onlinehome.de/) do something like this), and I think it would be GREAT!

What do you think?

this request is all ready to this forum......i totaly agree with u.....i dont know if is possible to Ono to code this......Ono? any luck to resume?

Can we make this the official "resume" petition forum? It's got my signature.

Please, Nick!

I would also much appreciate this!

I like to do large(1920x1200) renders and I wouldn't mind waiting the time indigo takes to do this if I could stop and resume it at a later time but at the moment the longest render I can usually run is about 15 hours which corrosponds to overnight + my morning classes. Once I get home I want my system again.

So, long story short: add my signature to the petition!

Althought I'm against pressure lobbys I would have to apply to that feature, well that would be cool but maybe there is more prioritary stuff to implement; no special idea tho...

Also I'm begging myself if that would not imply to write all previous iterations on disk, or would the current state of the image+geometry be enough ?

...

I would expect that at worst it would require creating a file the a little larger than the amount of memory indigo was taking up at the time to render the image, but I've never experimented with writing resume functions so I don't know to much about it.

Without knowing details about Indigo, a guess would be a resume file made up of the current framebuffer contents and the random seed used to generate it so far.

Then, (like a server already does) simply start render from a new seed and apply the results.


Or you could just run indigo in low priority and use your computer while it runs anyway. I know which one is easier to implement

Without knowing details about Indigo, a guess would be a resume file made up of the current framebuffer contents and the random seed used to generate it so far.

Then, (like a server already does) simply start render from a new seed and apply the results.

That easy ?

Or you could just run indigo in low priority and use your computer while it runs anyway. I know which one is easier to implement

Agree. That's what I did yesterday, and I came to forgot Indigo was running while I was modeling and doing rendering tests (with a biased renderer ). Well, that's even more efficient if you have two procs...

If such an resume function would exist, imagine to keep your Indigo + Project on you MP3 Player

where ever you are, just plug your MP3 Player into the next machine, and continue rendering...

Visiting a Friend who owns a Quad Core Rig to watch a Movie and kill some Beer??

"Just Plug in and Render!!!"


Take a moment to think about it... portable & Resumable!!!

In School just setup a gigantic Renderfarm in minutes in the Computer Room!

@ZomB:

What a fantastic idea!!!

Add 1 more request vote for this feature

for all you windows users- while we still don't have a resume function, you can substutute stopping for setting the indigo process to low priority. this works especialy well if you have a dual core pc, then you can not also set it to low, but also set the affinity to only one core. all this can be accessed by right clicking on the process in the ctrl alt delete process panel. although, a true resume would be nice.

oodmb wrote:for all you windows users- while we still don't have a resume function, you can substutute stopping for setting the indigo process to low priority. this works especialy well if you have a dual core pc, then you can not also set it to low, but also set the affinity to only one core. all this can be accessed by right clicking on the process in the ctrl alt delete process panel. although, a true resume would be nice.

You Are right Dude, but this Tips are only interesting if you want to keep working while rendering in Indigo!

The Idea behind resuming is to be able to render a Scene for maybe a week,
to get 8000x6000px rendering (for a Poster for example) "noise free" WITHOUT having the computer on
for a week!
Put Indigo into you Autostart, and it will resume rendering the Scene each time you start your computer...
lower the Process Priority, and do what ever you want on your PC,
Play games, work, read your eMails...

Its the possibility to keep running Indigo like Seti@home in the Background!

codemonk wrote:I would expect that at worst it would require creating a file the a little larger than the amount of memory indigo was taking up at the time to render the image, but I've never experimented with writing resume functions so I don't know to much about it.

an option to (7-)ZIP your "memory File" could keep your HDD clean.
This would require a "shut Indigo Down" GUI option, that compresses the "memory File" after stopped rendering,
Ok, a longer start up Time included

Anyway,

the possibility to keep running Indigo like Seti@home in the Background!

is definitly a great concept imo. Not really the "background" one, but for the "resume". I killed a 16h render coz I had to reboot, couldn't help

codemonk wrote:I would expect that at worst it would require creating a file the a little larger than the amount of memory indigo was taking up at the time to render the image, but I've never experimented with writing resume functions so I don't know to much about it.

It just needs the ability to save a file that contains the following:

- The raw MLT histogram (roughly the same size as an exported HDR image)
- Image scaling parameters (average F, number of histogram samples etc.)
- A reference to the .xml scene file

Optionally, could also store various other render metrics (e.g. elapsed time) so the whole process appears to be seamless once it's resumed.

... which isn't much at all (around 22Mb for a 1600x1200 render)

It helps to include a way of ensuring that the .xml is still exactly the same one that was used to start the render. Best way to do this is to calculate a hash code for the original and store it in the session file.

Ian.