heyas; oh, the pic was much bigger than this, of course. (no it didnt take 30 hours to render 450x320! lol!) now the honeymoon is really over! after that, i went to patch render the blackened parts. as you may know, vue doesnt calculate the patch area based on the entire image area, but tries to blow up the patch to the entire image size. but that was okay, so i thought, if i select the entire band going across, i know what size to make it (3300... um, or was i doing 2200? i forget). but NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! you cant render a patch to disk! why? i dont know! and of course, you CANT render to screen bigger than 1600x1200 even if you wanted to tempt fate and try it. so then i had to select half the strip and render to 1600xwhatever. all right. until i moved the dratted render area bit over to do the right half. then i get 'cant render to screen bigger than 1600blahblahblah.' i tell it to USE RENDER AREA. it is set to 1600xwhatever. it keeps telling me i cant render bigger than 1600, i keep telling it IM NOT TRYING TO! finally i hit okay, and whats it do? tries to render the whole smeggin picture. hellooooo? see this render area??? so i draw the smeggin render area again. no, it doesnt see the render area. it wants to render the whole image 1600x. and not even! it wants to shrink my image to 1500x something, dont know whats up with that, but it doesnt matter, its WRONG! so i try again, and geeze, you GOTTA draw the fool render area from the top left to the bottom right or else it doesnt exist. yeeesh. but at least i have the two top patches now. no clue if they fit, i know i'm going to have to resize them. tomorrow, i can probably get the bottom patches done. well, this is it, i am not rendering to disk any more. i'll do patches and sew 'em together if i have to, but this is ridiculous. why is it messed up? one or more of these reasons: 1: stopping/resuming render. i end up with render errors almost every time i do this when rendering to disk. 2: renaming the scene after each session (hawkd1/hawkd2). perhaps the blank parts are when it was named #2 and the regular parts are from when it was named #1. dunno. (mike: ignore what i told you in that other thread about this.) 3: running other stuff while rendering? now, mostly, i didnt. i cleaned my apartment while vue sat there doing its bit, for the most part. nearly went nuts with no computer, but i did it. two or three evening sessions, i was online while rendering. so i dunno. usually this doesnt bother vue. i suspect #1 most of all. i dont have any power-downing thingydoodles on my system. nor screen savers. i learned my lesson in ray dream! ;) render to disk sucks.