[Bf-cycles] Progressive Animation Rendering

[Greg Zaal]

Greetings fellow cyclists,

Looking through the Todo list the other day (
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:2.6/Source/Render/Cycles/ToDo) I
remembered how some people asked for progressive animation rendering, where
you render the whole animation with low samples, and then render again and
again to refine it.

I've hacked an addon together (
http://adaptivesamples.wordpress.com/2013/07/22/progressive-animation-render-addon-and-image-stacking/)
which works just fine. In a nutshell, it renders the animation/image using
a random or incrementing Seed each time, then renders it again the
specified number of times using more random/increased seeds. Finally at the
end, or when you're happy with it, it'll merge each set of seeds for every
frame and give you the clean animation. The problem is that it relies on an
external command-line program, ImageMagick, to merge the images together at
the end.

I'd like to know if there's any interest in this sort of thing, and if
so,(1) if someone could help me with it by coding the image merging bit to
combine all the different seeds so that an external program is not
required. And (2), after starting the Progressive Render, it's impossible
to stop it without actually killing the process, is there a way around
this? I've had to use Campbell's method from the Cell Fracture addon just
to refresh the UI and display progress..

Or perhaps there's a better way with more solid integration with the
rendering process?
Since it's on the Todo list, I assume it's eventually meant to be a part of
blender itself and not simply an addon.

Cheers,
Greg Zaal
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