Request: Anim preview feature
Hi,
it would be nice to have an automatic preview feature. I image it like that:
When I submit a scene with long rendertime/frame, I submit it in final quality and resolution, but click a "preview" button. This automatically submits the job with 25% resolution and only every 5th frame will be rendered. Once the preview has been rendered, I can decide if it´s going to be rendered in the final resolution or be canceled cause of errors in the scene.
From my point of view extremly valueble, could save a lot of hassle, prevent canceling sessions, prevent people crunching scenes where I already see after 50 frames I will have to render it again.
From the farms point of view (at least at the moment) this would bring in some extra workload that is "soft" (I see people complaining about too heavy sessions as well as about no work to do)
I would think the traffic issues (taking a long time to finish a session) would be counter productive to getting a "quick" animation.
Render locally (or submit to the farm) with a lower resolution, and use the step feature to render every 10th frame (or whatever you set 'step' to).
And even uncheck the raytracing box (under Shading) to speed things way up (no reflections or transparencies).
Does anybody know if the Render Preview window (Shift-P in 2.49) will be available in 2.6?
but if you just uncheck raytracing, hdr and indirect lightning will be gone -> my scenes e.g. would come out black
Agreed. It would be pretty ugly (not good to submit here), but you can see if your waves are moving (unless it's behind a glass wall).
An OpenGL render of the viewport is another option (to show the waves moving).
This is one of the crazy things about distributed computing: The farm mostly doesn't care whether it is rendering a preview or a full-ress version. It is going to take approximately the same amount of time anyways because most of the time is spent transmitting files back and forth and getting the session accepted by admins.
In other words: Go ahead and render at the final resolution always.
If you want to be really nice to the admins you test a single frame fom your animation on your own machine before submitting and give them the runtime in the description field (this also helps with issues such as forgetting that the 50% button is on or the resolution is wrong).
That's seems like a really cool idea and is quite much in line with some of our own ideas about how work submission should work in order to make the accessibily and acceptance rate as high as possible.
BTW. I'm thinking that we might implement the Ideatorrent module for technical development suggestions. Ideatorrent is also used at Blenderstorm.org and jesterKing recently ported to work with MySQL in Drupal. Do you guys think this could be a good way of collecting ideas for us too? At least it would be familiar to the Blender community.
Julius Tuomisto Project Administrator Laurea SID Networks, Espoo, Finland Tel. +358-50-4135412