[Bf-funboard] Render pause

[GSR]

Hi,
joeedh at gmail.com (2007-07-06 at 1236.57 -0700):
> > With the ability to pause the render we can temporarily suspend
> > the first render to concentrate some minutes on the second work or
> > secondary tasks (urgent need to send an email, to answer a chat's
> > contact, to look a video, to make some researches) without all
> > being slowed down by the render.
> > Is it possible ?
> > With the work on render api, is it a feature wich could be established ?
> Just lower blender's process priority.  In windows (assuming you've 
> already started blender) you do this by right clicking the taskbar, 
> clicking "Task Manager", clicking the "Processes" tab on the dialogue 
> that comes up, right-click blender.exe in the list and do Set 
> Priority->BelowNormal .  I don't know how to do it in linux or OSX.

In Unix you use renice (or nice if at launch), but you will not be
able to renice back to normal level if you do not have the rights to
do so. It should not hurt as if there is nothing else it will get full
CPU anyway. OTOH, you can always use kill -STOP and -CONT and freeze
the process as needed.

What would be interesting is a way to truly hibernate a render and
continue later (after reboots, different machine, etc). As somone
mentioned, POVRay does it, but IIRC it had to reparse the scene (which
can take some serious time), basically it was just a plain render that
initialices the render result from a file and computes the missing
pixels. So the reall bonus is in saving the state.

GSR