Rendering in Lightwave...

[DeathsHead]

I've had this question pop'n in and out of my head for quite awhile now and just never went anywhere with it. So now I am.

"Is there any way of "Pausing" a rendering within Lightwave? This is one thing that I've liked about my days with 3DS Max, it & we had the ability to "Pause" any rendering midstream... and then begin where we left off at a later time. This is the one biggest thing about Lightwave & its rendering engine that I don't like at all. Its one thing to have a rendering thats going to take 20 hours or what have you, but not having the ability to pause it so that the system can be used for something else that may be needed at the moment ect just blows...

Now maybe there's a trick to this concept that I'm unaware of, but hey, thats why I've finally decided to ask the question thats bugged my since my inception into Lightwave 7.


Death'


:cool:

[Capt Lightwave]

No, LightWaves native renderer can't be paused when rendering a single image.
If you're rendering image sequences, you can always stop rendering and continue form where you left off, but if you want to pause rendering in a single image, FPrime is the way to go....

[tudor]

I hit control+ald+delete, go to processes, select lightwave, and set the priority to low. This way Lightwave's processor usage drops when you want to do something else.

[Exception]

That should be CTRL-Shift-Escape. And yes, Lightwave responds much better to the command of Low Priority than 3D Studio does. It will feel like its no longer rendering, with only a slight impact on whatever you want to do.

Also, Fprime can be paused, even stopped midframe and resumed later on.

[iaef]

I have always thought that it is better to lower the priority on LW rendering threads than pausing it. Because any time you use interactively your workstation, I bet your CPU usage will drop to an effective 20%. This is because we humans are so slow, and CPU's crunch numbers so fast.

I have been experimenting on rendering and percentages of use lately and found that during work hours, on a group of 40 workstations we use in average as low as 1% of CPU capacity and on it's best days the capacity raises up to 40% (this is when several users have to make architectural renderings).