Tracking your render progress

Question

Doing high quality renders requieres too much time, we all know that.

Up until now I have always been roughtly calculating when I have to start then next render and many times it has ment getting up in the middle of the night to start up the next one.

Is there anyway to track the progress, for example when a render is done to get an alarm on Windows or on my phone?

yep: https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/Render/Notify_after_render — brockmann, Aug 10 '17 at 09:45
@brockmann Can you add it as an answer so that I can change it to "answered"? — Bonorose, Aug 10 '17 at 10:04
As an off-topic suggestion: consider doing your renders via the command line, so that you can just concatenate several render instructions and have your N-th render start only when the (N-1)-th has finished. To concatenate, use ";" on Linux/macOS or "&" on Windows. — Nicola Sap, Aug 10 '17 at 10:12

Blender For You · Accepted Answer · 2017-10-29T20:29:40.483

I am not sure you are still struggling with your render as its a late answer. But may be useful for some one else too.

Its not good to do that manually or set the finished alarm.

I will take back you to 90's where we can set the commands in command prompt in a batch, using batch files.

Lets say you want to render two files you may use it like this

cd C:\Users\Me\Downloads\blender-2.79-windows64 

blender -b "D:\Path\Train 001.001.blend" -s 1 -e 2 -a

blender -b "D:\Path\Train 002.001.blend" -s 2 -e 4 -a

The first line is for the blender exe file path, you may set it according to your system.

The second and third lines are for rendering two different files and different frames.

You may save the above code in a text file and save it anywhere in your computer and with any name but extension should be .bat

Now right click on file (.bat) we just created and Run as administrator

You may add as much files and frames as you like

or have several interesting and useful render options here Command Line

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 10 '17 at 14:11

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I'm not sure if this helps, but if you have to render several images anyway, you could open blender in as much instances as needed, and render your images parallel. Your system will divide resources evenly, and after one job finishes, the other blender instances get more power accordingly.

Additionally, if you need one instance to finish before the others, try reducing the task priority of the lesser important renderings - at least under Windows this results in full system use for your first job while the others have to wait their turn.

answered Aug 10 '17 at 14:11

Grimm

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Task priority is a more CPU related topic. Even if I was running a Xenon E7-8894 v4 this can not and will not compete with a dual or triple SLI configuration, which I am running on two machines (M TitanXs and 1070s). Also I have previously attempted this and after you run out of GPUs to allocate (let's say 1GPU per Blender instance) queueing more resulted in system instability. – Bonorose Aug 11 '17 at 05:52

Tracking your render progress

2 Answers2