Is anyone using the Progressive renderer for production rendering? I mean, saving from the VFB as your final? It seems that the denoiser is a no-brainer, however, it is a guessing game when using the Bucket renderer and it is pretty quick feedback in Progressive. I was told that you don’t use Progressive as your final. When you are happy with the Progressive image then you switch to Bucket for the final. Is this your workflow?
I used to do that, but had a few issues with stuck buckets and got sick of seeing a render having been and still being on a single bucket for hours. Now I tend to only use progressive. At first I was hesitant but I figured as corona only renders that way why not. But I do render for a longtime just to be on the safe side (5000px, 0.005 noise threshold, exteriors 6-10 hours, interiors 10-12 hours on a dual xeon 32core machine). Often I don’t see a difference between the beauty render and the denoised version. It is somewhat overkill, but I render at night with rendernodes so time isn’t an issue anyway.
My main drawback vs bucket is that the render id element is never “clean or sharp” so colour selections in photoshop is never quite right. But at 5000px its ok. I also found that the bucket render often took longer (15+ hours) and was minimally cleaner.
Render ID is an integer channel so it’s not designed to give you smooth edges, each pixel just gives you the ID of whatever object is closest to camera or takes up most space in the pixel. Give wirecolor or multimatte a look instead for edge quality, perhaps combining the two!
I use PSD Manager, which gives me a mask of every layer. I was told by V-Ray support not to use Progressive as a final render. Once you have setup your scene and like what Progressive is giving you then switch to bucket. I am using buckets because of PSD Manager, but would probably go all Progressive if it wasn’t for PSD Manager and the layer mask creation.
Maybe a dumb question.. but are you talking about IPR rendering or doing a render in progressive then switch to bucket?
If the first then i agree that’s more safe and betterbto use the normal bucket rendering . if the second then i do use progressive sometimes when i want to limit the rendertime for example in animation or when I have very tight deadline
Progreessive use more Ram afaik especially for high resolution renders, I haven’t tried that in recent versions tho
What’s the difference between IPR and Progressive? Aren’t they one in the same?
There are some features that don’t work with IPR .Don’t know the technicalities but there is a difference
Progressive is a sampling method like Bucket is. Don’t confuse it with IPR which is the interactive rendering feature.
Yes, you can use bucket and progressive rendering in IPR mode. So, the recommendation is not to use progressive in IPR, but bucket in IPR mode is okay?
The recommendation IS to use Progressive with IPR. 
It’s the default for a reason. I always use Progressive sampler with IPR. This way I get instant feedback (even if a bit noisy in the first few seconds). If you use Bucket sampler with IPR, you’ll have to wait for the buckets to finish before you see the changes in your image which is not great IMHO.
I agree, but I swear I was told not to work that way by support. I’ll find that post and share the link. Probably a moot point, if it works keep doing it.
Sorry to confuse you with my question =D!
both buckets and progressive are equally usable for final rendering and can be used also for IPR.
I think the support are talking about using the big “Render” button for final render and not the IPR (the interactive mode ) and that what I agree with .
IPR is handy to check materials , light ..etc but using it for final can put u in a risk like accidentally change the camera, light or anything that will refresh the render and you lose the rendered image.
Fstorm users for example use the interactive renderer for finals too but they have a “Lock” button to avoid this situation but for me Just use IPR for tests and the regular “Render” button for final .
I hope it is clear now 
It took me awhile, but I found it. Supports says no to using IPR for your production renderer.
I was told that you don’t use Progressive as your final
In the link you have posted Peter was referring to not using IPR to do final render (regardless if you are using progressive or buckets type under image sampler settings) for the reason I mentioned in my previous replay of not losing your rendered image.
Yep ,ipr is super practical especially with gpu, but even touching the material editor makes it restart sometimes. So definitely not for the final rendering.
So progressive render is fine and interactive progressive rendering isn’t. I guess I didn’t know there was a difference.
IPR also doesn’t use DBR (locka only)
if you are using progressive for finals, then denoising is a must as it takes sooooooo much longer to clean up fine noise.
Okay, I get it now. Pick render from the pull down and not the frame buffer or the IPR button.
Progressive is perfectly fine for production especially if you render on a powerful local workstation. But if you send them in DR I’d stick with bucket. I personally experienced very erratic results with Progressive over DR : the CPU usage of the nodes is much lower than bucket.
Yep, progressive DR seems a bit pointless to me. I think it was because it needs to almost constantly send/receive updates from the other nodes. Whereas bucket only has the network traffic to start/finish the bucket.