After adding renders to the queue you can suspend a running render. It shows "suspended" but keeps on rendering anyway (and updating the percentage complete). I'd like to be able to add multiple renders to a queue but keeping the queue in a suspended state until I retire for the night. I'm running the render queue on the same box as Poser. Don't know if this is a new problem in Poser 11.2 as I never used the queue previously.

Hi jfbeute, I'm running MacOS, so that may not be a perfect replica of your situation. With Poser 11.2, I can see the same thing you do, queuing a render which then can't be suspended (it's completion percentage keeps increasing, showing that the FFRender process isn't pausing, which it actually may not be able to do at all, since Poser uses that process itself for internal renders, and there's no way to pause and resume a Poser internal render), unless I Cancel it from the QueueManager window.

The alternative which does work for me, though, is to select Suspended from the Queue menu in QueueManager, before sending the render to the Queue in Poser.

So any previous jobs in the Queue will show up as Suspended* in the Status column. Having done that, QueueManager will still accept new jobs from Poser, but the renders will not be sent to the FFRender process until you unsuspend the queue.

The job above has now been sitting in my queue for 7 minutes without starting to render, since I suspended the queue before submitting it.

Now, I've just queued up a second render, also suspended.

so they're both waiting in the queue. When I select Suspended from the Queue menu, so the tick mark goes away:

I start to get progress on the first render, with the second waiting. I assume this is what you were trying to do?

Will try this soonest.

In that case the suspend button shouldn't be available for currently running renders (as it doesn't do anything).

And it should be possible to add a job to the queue in suspended state from within Poser.

Currently when starting the Queue Manager it will begin some rendering job (although nothing is actually queued). As far as I can tell it's the last render job executed within Poser. This is clearly a bug. It doesn't do this when it is started by Poser when a new job is queued.

The name of the button is perhaps misleading. It really is only referring to the queue. Once a queued job has commenced renderering, it is technically no longer in the queue, but has been assigned to the render engine, which has never had the ability to suspend and resume a render in progress, only cancel.

The feature you ask for, Submit suspended job, has not been implemented at the Poser end, though that's not to say it could not be done. For the locally running QueueManager, it really doesn't take much more effort to swap to the QueueManager app and click on Suspended in the Queue menu. All subsequently queued jobs from Poser will still be submitted to the queue, but will not be presented for rendering, which is what I demonstrated previously.

I have not noticed that Queue Manager when started will resume a previously completed job. It may certainly parse the queue for previous jobs to determine their status, but if they are marked Done, nothing further will happen. A status of Done also indicates that the completed render has been copied to the specified destination on the host, if QueueManager is running on a remote, though you do mention you're running it locally, as my example followed. Can you report what you are seeing that indicates that QueueManager has begun some rendering job?

I'm sure there are many users, myself included, who have repeatedly requested the ability to suspend a render in progress. Such facility is not yet available to Poser, unless an external renderer like Reality/Luxrender or Octane is used.

With a bit more testing I found that on starting the Queue Manager will restart the last incomplete render. Even if this render was cancelled. This happens even after the render has been removed from the queue. Since I have a problem when renders crashing this even happens if the render was reported as finished (after a crash) but it actually was incomplete.

The last incomplete render job just shows up as an entry and shows running with an increasing percentage complete.

In my opinion the entire Queue Manager is not really a well though out product. It could have been a lot better when implemented as a real queue manager comparable to other queue managers.