Can you stop a render early and still save the image in the render window?

pctech4ny

Sorry if this is a newb-ish question, but I've got a render that was suposed to stop at 95% convergence, and it just will not go above 94.60%. It reached the 94.60% converged after about 500 cycles. Now it is at 4000+ cycles and still never seen an update on the convergence.

So, if I hit cancel on the rendering status pane open in the main window, will the box with the rendered image stick around long enough for me to save the image?

If not, I'll have to cancel it, and re-render it later after changing the render convergence threshold to 94.50% I guess. Time to leave for work and don't have time for it to hit the other cutoff triggers.

EDIT: and it finally reached convergence and stopped after 4900+ cycles.

I'd still like to know answer to my question though.

barbult

Yes, with Iray, the image render window stays open after you cancel the render. You can then resume the render, save the render, or close the window to discard the render. A handy technique is to cancel the render, and then use the File/Save Last Render (not Save Last Draw) command to save the current state of the render. Then resume the render to let it go longer and get better. That way you have saved an intermediate version, in case something goes wrong later, like Daz Studio crashing.

Sevrin

If you are using canvasses, this works as well, but you need to go and dig intermediate ones out of your temp folder, usually something like C:\Users\WhateverUsernameYouPicked\AppData\Roaming\DAZ 3D\Studio4 Public Build\temp\render\r_canvases.  And for some reason, some canvasses can show up with a bit of delay.

pctech4ny

Thank you. I've always been afraid to try it before now as was worried about possibly losing hours of render progress.

Now that I have a NVidia GPU and am using Iray, I'll have to remember this.

(BTW, I suspect one particular object in my scene that might have been the issue: I had Tyrannosaurus Rex 3 in the scene and had the "saliva prop" in its mouth. From a different camera angle than this exact render, the HDRI sky light caught the saliva and caused a prominent sort of refraction effect. In this render that seemed to never converge, in the preview window the saliva strands were visible, kind of glinting like a spiderweb. In the finally finished render, you can just sort of squint just right and see the saliva strands in the dino's mouth.)

barbult

When you have one small area like that that won't converge, you can stop and save the full render and then do a spot render of that small unconverged area. (Be sure to select to render the spot render to a New Window in the Tool Settings pane first.) The spot render will do many more iterations on that small area in a short time, Then you can save the spot render file as a PNG with transparent background and composite it with the full render in an image editor later.

Sven Dullah

barbult said:

Yes, with Iray, the image render window stays open after you cancel the render. You can then resume the render, save the render, or close the window to discard the render. A handy technique is to cancel the render, and then use the File/Save Last Render (not Save Last Draw) command to save the current state of the render. Then resume the render to let it go longer and get better. That way you have saved an intermediate version, in case something goes wrong later, like Daz Studio crashing.

In case some 3DL user sees this, I'd like to add that the render window stays open also with 3DL, after you cancel. But once cancelled, you can't resume the render.