Rendering only a section of the viewport?

[AcesHigh]

This would be extremely helpful when rendering ultra large images... if it was possible to divide the final render in several "squares"... rendering each square separately would be less of a burden on the computer than a single 5k x 5k pixels image... then you just piece them all together at Photoshop to form the larger image...

[thomthom]

Re: Rendering only a section of the viewport?

1.48.66+ has Render Region.
All though I am not sure if you get 100% matching colours when you render only a portion. And I don't think that when you sum it all up that is is a less burden on the computer. It still has to parse the whole model.

In any case - the better alternative is a render farm. You don't even need special hardware for this, grab hold of older computers that are being replaced. At my office we have for the last year replaced a bunch of P4 2.6 - 3.4GHz computers - single core. I've hooked up 6 of them into a renderfarm and while they are not great computers, they do help immensely when I got a deadline looming and for them large final renders.

[AcesHigh]

Re: Rendering only a section of the viewport?

ThomThom, I think the the problem is not the parsing time, but memory problems. The problems with large renders always happen midway through rendering because of tempo folder or memory problems.


Thinking of that, would BLOCKING part of the camera view help anything?? Like... manually blocking part of the scene and then blocking another and another, and then join all parts in photoshop?

[thomthom]

Re: Rendering only a section of the viewport?

I you run into memory problems then render to vrimage - that preserves more memory during render as the image is written directly to file.