Alright so my computer has been rendering a scene for about 15 hours and I really need to use my PC, obviously, blenders use as much CPU as it can which makes it quite laggy to use and I would like to know if there is any way to pause mid-render. I also use blender 2.8 and also 2.7 most of the time. If you have any suggestions to help me out please let me know. Thanks!
Well… if Blender can’t do this, it sure would be a nice feature to add! I run into the same problem.
Sometimes you need a day to render an animation
If it’s an animation I find it easier to render it to single images and combine them later. It means you can stop at any time and the next time you want to render some frames you just start with the required frame number instead of frame 1.
Are you trying to push everything through in one go? Try splitting it up into more manageable chunks so you don’t have to pause or cancel.
Have you considered changing the CPU niceness(lLinux)/priority(Windows) for Blender temporarily? That way Blender will keep running, but it won’t hog the CPU, allowing other programs to run without so much lag.