3doutlaw opened this issue on Sep 06, 2012 ยท 11 posts
bagginsbill posted Thu, 06 September 2012 at 12:37 PM
I have been working on a Python add-on that will tell you this info, based on previous renders of the same scene, and assuming that you're about to do a bigger or smaller size. It's actually a utility to quickly change render size. But I thought it would be handy to know, as I'm mouse-wheeling to larger sizes, some sort of prediction of how long that will take to render.
Well - let me tell you, that even with no changes in the scene or render settings, it is incredibly difficult to predict how long the next render will be. The only thing that is for sure is that more pixels will take more time to render. But how much more is a non-linear function. I have tried to characterize this function through many experiments but it is discouraging. I am only able to get approximately 30 to 40% accuracy. For example, if a 500x500 (25 KPixel) render takes 6 minutes, and you then double the dimensions and now you're going to render 1000x1000 (100 KP), you'd think that would be 24 minutes becomes it's 4 times more pixels. It's usually actually around 18 minutes. Conversely, if you do a full render and it takes an hour, then you decide to do some more tests and drop to half size, it may still take almost half an hour. Weird.
If, on top of that, you change render settings or content, or even camera angle, it would be even more inaccurate.
So - as far as I know, there is no easy way to accurately estimate as a pure prediction.
Your idea of examining a log or something and getting % complete (from which you could estimate remaining time) would be cool but I'm not aware of anything going on like that behind the scenes.
Python scripts get absolutely no opportunity to even do some work during the render, even if the progress info was available somewhere.
I wonder, now, if the buckets get written to a file in a way that we could measure the file size. Hmmm - I'll have to think about that. It would have to be an outside tool though - or you'd have to use render in background to make a Python script running inside Poser be able to do it.
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