OK, I'm rendering a Bryce movie. Not very long, 10 seconds again, but at 20fps (sorry, I really don't have the patience to go higher). It's using a chess set (blame Shadowdragonlord) I'm also moving the pieces at a rate of one move per second and get to check-mate in the animation. But, is there a way of pausing a render, saving and restarting? Like you can with a static render? At the moment, I'm pausing and then resuming. Which is OK, but doesn't have a save option, I can't avoid overheat or shutdown problems.

If you render as bmp frames you can render the time sequence at 5 sec to 7 sec or any value you like. Bryce will even number the frames correctly for you. If you die you can restart at the next frame number just type the time into the animation control win you start rendering. You still have to be able to assemble the bmp sequence to a movie. Animation shop that comes with paintshop pro will output AVI and there are freeware and probably better programs that can do sound as well.

I'm pretty darn sure that you would have to render your scene file as a .bmp sequence in order to pause and save what you have so far and then resume rendering at a later time. I render animations on my laptop occasionally and haven't had a prob with overheating since I put the machine up on thin wood blocks(also acts as a cooling channel) and use a small fan to blow air from the side. This cools the laptop from above and below. I've rendered animations up to 15 sec. long with no signs of distress from the machine.

(Oooops,crosspost,lol!)

I like the idea of BMP. I'm 4 hours into this render now, with 3 left to go. So might let it finish. I suppose if it did crash, it creates an AVI to that point and I could start from that frame to a new AVI file and there must be a shareware prog to combine AVI movies. As for over heating, I'm putting a farn pointing straight at the intake and it helps a lot. My laptop is a Comapq Presario, which are really bad at heat management. Thanks for all the suggestions.

Attached Link: Chess set animation

OK, here it is. 3 meg, 7 hours and one stupid error. But I'm pretty happy with this. And the complete game is fools mate. White wins in 8 moves or so. Actually beat a mate of mine with this once. It was classic! But he was a little pissed off. The pawn that is taken was supposed to fly gently off the table, but it kinda goes into orbit. The AVI shows it falling off the table, but the MPEG conversion chopped off the last few frames. Now for the blindingly stupid error. I forgot to link the sun to the view. SO the camera angle is moving, but the position of the sun is fixed, so the lighting is wrong and towards the end shows through the sphere (you can see star shapes on the table). Might redo it once my PC stops smoking. Enjoy.

I meant, unlink the sun to the view, but you knew that.

I'm not a Bryce user anymore, but I have to say this is a highly impressive little animation and excellent use of fake HDRI... Considering you did it in Bryce, I'm even more impressed. Looks great. (The HDRI is faked, correct? Or did Bryce actually impliment real HDRI into the software recently?) Nice work.

It's Fake.

"I suppose if it did crash, it creates an AVI to that point and I could start from that frame to a new AVI file and there must be a shareware prog to combine AVI movies." if I'm reading this right, it can't be done. When a render crashes while ouputting to avi, the file will be corrupted. Not a program out there that can "fix" it to my knowledge. BMP sequences is the way to go next time, just a fail proof way of making sure your renders will get done :-) p.s. great movie! very impressive use of HDRI. Is the choppiness of the movie due to the framerate, compressor or is it just on my end?

Probably a mixture of framerate and of the way I compressed it from AVI to MPG. But saying that, it's not too choppy on my machine.

It looks like the pawn comes down next to the couch almost at the end of the movie. It looks like it's supposed to fly off the board. Maybe you grabbed it in the keyframe by accident. It doesn't look bad at all on my machine, in fact it looks great.

It was supposed to fly up off the board, hit the ceiling and then fall by the couch. I haven't quite worked out things like animation paths. Just start and end and a few tweens. Glad it looks good on yours. I have reposted since the previous comments, using a different compression. Maybe that helped.

Very cool animation drawbridgep! I haven't really noticed any Bryce animations using HDRI until your recent experiments. I hope you do more because they are quite effective.