How does one go about rendering a large project and work on a different file? Does one just open another instance of Blender? I believe that I have read all the documentation and watched videos, and it appears that you have to wait until it finishes.
What does CR do with the animation render when it is finished? Is it saved somewhere automagically?
G'day
So, being honest about the addon's capability, it does not like (work) if you have the addon saved as enabled, and you open an additional Blender instance. And of course, opening a second instance of blender is kind of what you have to do in order to achieve what I think you want.
Lets walk through an example, assuming you want to render project A and work on project B.
1. You'll need to make sure Crowdrender is not enabled when you start blender, you should disable it in Blender's user preferences, then save your user preferences.
2. Open one instance of blender, enable the addon, open project A, connect your render nodes, and start rendering. You'll need to keep this session of blender open for the duration of the render.
3. Open project B in a separate instance of blender and of course DO NOT enable the addon this time. Doing so will cause project A to stop rendering.
This is the temporary work around, I've probably mentioned this so many times that I am likely no longer an engineer but a salesman, but anyways, we're completely redesigning both addon and the core system so that rendering will not require you to keep the session with Project A open at all. It will be fire and forget.
In fact the new system will allow you to completely turn off the computer you started the rendering from, and pick the project back up later, when you feel like it.
Hope this helps, please let us know if any of this is either confusing, or doesn't work in your case.
Thanks!
Thanks for the quick response. I was thinking the same workaround as you put forth.
Where does CR save the animation when it is completed? I was used to 2.79b Net Render and it letting you save the animation file to a directory of your choosing.
Hi, ok, CR saves intermediate results from each node in a special directory structure, there is a setting in the add-on's preferences to set this directory.
However, since CR is tightly integrated with blender, the final render images are actually available inside blender as a render result after each frame is complete.
This means that you can actually setup your output settings in the render properties panel in blender and ask blender to output the images to a directory of your choosing. The final frames will end up there.
You can even setup compositing inside blender and the compositing pass will be run on each completed frame before the resulting image file is saved to disk. Oh, and yeah, make sure you set the render output to frames not video. CR isn't perfect and can sometimes miss a frame. Working on fixing that as well.
Does that help?
Yes, that helps, thanks! I forgot about the location and remember seeing it under the Add On.
Gilligan moment.
No dramas mate. Normally you won't need the intermediate results, they're just parts of the overall frame, not the whole image. Eventually these will be cleaned up automatically too as they're quite useless once the frame has been written to disk by blender.