Suggestion for dynamic bucket splitting.

[JD3D_CGI]

Often when I rendering certain scenes, there are some items that take considerably longer to render than others - for example an area of trees.

I often find myself staring at a render node with one bucket left rendering that last tree long after everything else has finished.

So here's an idea - tally up which buckets or areas seem to be taking the longest to render in the last frame, and use that as the beginning point for the triangulation or hilbert curve sequence

I think it would be possible to guide the bucket movement process a little more intelligently.

Another suggestion would be to turn off "mouse following" when the job has been sent to the render farm (or the the frame range is set to anything other than still)

[aida]

+1 for these suggestions.

Both of them would be a huge speed improvement.

Dynamic bucket splitting could also cancel buckets which are still rendering when DR nodes get idle and reassign them split into smaller buckets.

[Rens]

Another idea would be to have the idle cores split render the last bucket(s) in parallel to the one currently rendering. The first to finish rendering wins!
This way you don't need to do a tally prepass and your render will be much quicker to finish if you have things like trees or small bright highlights where buckets get stuck on.
Vlado, would that work?