Attached Link: http://www.visionized.com

Okay, here's the scenerio. I'm rendering some rather large pieces for music packaging. I was 20 hours into it, and as usual our power went out, my battery backup can only go so long on this Dual Athlon, and I lost the render. Is there a way to setup a render so that if I lost power I can pause it, save the progress and power down within my 20 minute window? Or is there a setup where I can ensure if I'm not around, and Florida Progressive fails I'm not SOL? Damn salt air. Any thoughts would be appreciated.

None that I'm aware of. -Kix

sigh I thought as much. But wanted to hear from the Carrara pros to edify. Thanks Kix

Use something like VMWare or VirtualPC. Carrara will only see one processor, but you can suspend the virtual machine at will and save it to disk. After that you just shut down your host OS. Power comes on, you boot up, start VMWare and it will pick up where you left off. For something like rendering, VMWare will actually run pretty fast, my test showed it at nearly 100% native speed when just rendering. Good luck, Eric Winemiller Digital Carvers Guild 3D plug-ins for Carrara http://digitalcarversguild.com

Thanks for that Eric! I'll be doing a bit of R and D today then. I know my husband has a Virtual running, never paid much attention to it, just saw it as one of his "cool toys". Great thought! I'll come back in the thread and post the outcome!

I am quite sure if you use "batch render" you could resume the render . I had a situation were my power went out and I could resume my render once I restarted my machine. If you were running on battery backup then you could pause the render, shut off your machine ,wait for the power to come back ,then start up machine and carrara and press "resume". Regards Mike

This is why I LOVE this forum. Thanks Mike for taking the time to jump in.

It's hard to believe people don't realize that "batch render" exists but it seems that most don't.

In the Render Room instead of choosing RENDER like you normaly do. (Hitting Render button on bottom left of screen.) Hit the BATCH QUEUE Tab (Bottom Left of screen). From there look to the right where it says ADD (hit this button)and browse through your files to find the file you wish to render. Set up the scence (Rendering Parts) as normal and then hit the LAUNCH button. If the power goes out simply hit the PAUSE button and then shut down. Carrara will save up to the latest square it was working on or in animation it will save up to the latest rendered image in the sequence. This way there will be no worries about losing your image.

And there you have it! I've batch rendered a ton of stuff but never paused it before. Never really had a reason. I've always used it when I have a bunch of renders I need to crunch over the course of several days. -Kix

I thought the Batch Render had an automatic save function. Is it in the Preferences Settings? Maybe I'm just making this up: I can't find anything in the manual and I can't get to my program right now.

The batch will save what you want if you tell it too. You can set it up in the original file or you can change all the render settings including where the final product will be saved when you setup a file in the batch processor. If you modify the render settings in the batch processor, none of the original render settings in the file will get changed. The batched render job will render with all the new settings you apply for batch only which would include what and where the final render is to be stored. It's pretty spiff. -Kix

In the preferences you can set which interval the Batch Render saves while rendering. In the slow days I once set this to 15 minutes and then found out that saving the rather enormous file took my old Mac, you guessed it, something like 15 minutes. That render never really took off.

Outstanding thread. Thanks to everyone! gigashadow: I knew about the batch render....I suppose the term "batch" through me off the path, considering I am not rendering a "batch" of graphics. I was rendering one piece, hence not investigating an option labeled for another event(s). But suffice it to say, I've given it a go, and although the lights haven't gone out to prove the point, it obviously does solve my personal puzzle. 8)

I suppose I didn't so much mean "know it's there" as I did, "know it's funtion". It's strange that people don't know how it functions considering A) it's pretty handy B) it's been there since version 1.

I'd also suggest if you are doing an animation to batch render but do it in sequence bitmaps( or whatever format you want) for an animation. For one it renders faster, because its rendering a single frame, then starting over basically. Plus if you need to stop, and things get screwy (power goes off, you spill soda on your keyboard) you can always start from the last frame rendered without having to worry if its been saved. Brian Hinton

Just as a final note, Most of my big renders are done in batch while I'm asleep. I do all the development with render settings in "test" mode and then I set it up in batch mode, jack up the settings and go to bed. That way I when I open the file, the "test" settings are still saved so my working environment is always available. The big final job doesn't go any faster if I'm sitting around watching so I do something else. -Kix

I'm a HUGE fan of the batch mechanism now. Florida Progressive stepped up and blew the transformer again! And yes, I had enough time to pause this out, and power down. Jumped back into it a couple of minutes ago smooth as silk.

ya know.. i have never used the batch render.. Now i think i will :)

Shees! I just had one of those rare crashes with my G4 Mac. With an unsaved render that took all night... We should never just hit that render button again...