GUI for VFB - save / render interractive buttons

[lukas_kostka]

Maybe I am the only one, but I very often mistake the Save Button for Render Interactive Button in VFB. I suppose the green arrow on the Render Interactive icon unconsciously confuses me. Maybe it is something that my brain has fixed from other applications. I do not know. The thing is, It happened to me many times that after many hours of rendering Production Render, I mistakenly press Render Interactive instead of Save and my render is gone. Is there a way to recover the finished render in such a case?
Some GUI improvement to prevent this would be really nice...

[deyan.hadzhiev]

Hi lukas_kostka - you can use the "Auto Save" feature of the VFB to store the current render in the History. This allows renders to be automatically saved to the history after a render has finished (or even when it has been manually stopped).

[lukas_kostka]

Thank you, deyan.hadzhiev. I use this save path to store previews. Will auto-save of production render option slow down the render? How often does it save the image if Auto save completed only is left unchecked?

But aside from this, it would be nice if the save button in VFB is placed somewhere else, for example on the left side of the window with RGB color options. It may not make sense but I think it would help the users, since majority of the apps I know have Save oprions menu located on the left and no confusion would happen. But hey, maybe I am the only one with this problem

[deyan.hadzhiev]

The "Auto Save" option in the VFB is only for saving images to the History after the renderer has finished or was stopped. So it does not affect render speed at all. The "Auto Save Completed Only" option is intended to avoid filling your history with aborted renders (manually stopped), so only renders which completed by reaching their time limit or noise threshold will be automatically saved. The actual time it needs to save the image to history varies based on the resolution, number of render elements and the file system speed.

This "Auto Save" functionality is different than the Resumable Rendering feature, which continuously saves the render results to disk and allows them to be continued later. The resumable rendering option does affect performance a bit, but provides a lot of flexibility.

About the button layout - it is highly unlikely that we will move it, because the VFB is designed to be consistent across multiple V-Ray integrations and reordering the layout affects all integrations. I'm not a UX expert, but frequently used buttons tend to develop muscle memory in users, and changing something like this needs a very strong motive for the change, due to the amount of users that would be affected.