I guess the title says it all, friends. I’ve been searching and there is not much info about ram previews. I had just assumed that functionality would be there.
What I’ve been able to surmise is that a blender viewport preview requires these steps:
Surely someone has created an addon to reduce these steps? Any discussion or advice is much appreciated. peace
RPaladin, thank you for your kind response but I am referring to a ram preview, not a preview of how much ram I have.
I mean the kind of ram preview wherein the software (in this case blender) renders a preview of the animation in the window to ram, so I can preview my animation in real time.
Thanks anyway, but no solution yet. peace
I don’t know if this will help, but you can use the Workbench renderer to render an animation and play it back with Render Menu > View Animation.
a59303, thank you. I think this is the best solution available so far. I set the renderer to workbench, hit CTL F12, then CTL F11 when it was done. Still too many steps but I suspect this can be automated. Many thanks for the advice. peace
If you’re looking for Python code, this should about do it.
import bpy
bpy.context.scene.render.engine = "BLENDER_WORKBENCH"
bpy.ops.render.play_rendered_anim()
To save the animation preview, you’ll need to add a bit more code. But since you’re only using previews, I’m not sure if they’re worth saving, unless you really want them for future references.
Great. I can’t think of a way to automate it but @RPaladin 's solution may work if you add some frames to the temp dir.
Great! I’ll try that, thanks!
(on edit): I’m not having any luck with this code so far. Upon further inspection, it doesn’t seem to include code to make the preview render in the first place.
All that happens when I run this is my player appears. A good piece of the puzzle, but first I need to automate the render command.
Pardon my noobiness, but it seems like it need the F12 in the middle of it.
Much appreciation for the help and advice. peace
My apologies as well. I didn’t include the Python operator for it because I thought you merely wanted to preview your scene, not render and save it locally. You’re looking for bpy.ops.render.render() then. Make sure to include the Animation argument and set it to True. If you have further questions or need help free to share them and I’ll try my best to answer them.
Press play button and look how it animated in realtime?
If it is not enough, you can script button to render preview animation?
Something like that script will set:
-Store settings you change
-Eevee engine
-Resolution to 640x360 and samples very low
-Limit texture and shadowmap, resolutions to 1K etc.
-Video compression to Mpeg-4 medium quality real time compression
It should render very fast.
GruntAxeman, thank you for your advice. Once I can get a newer machine, perhaps the space bar will be enough.
I’ll try your suggestion. And I will be working on scripting it, incorporating the render engine switch, resolution, etc. I’ve done a bit of maxscript in the past, but totally new to bpy.
For now my method is:
1 switch render settings
2 F12, wait (about .8 secs/frame)
3 F11
4 Spacebar to start the player, which is pretty much instantaneous.
It’s not too bad and I can live with it for now. (I’m mostly using this to evaluate MOCAP.)
Thanks! I started looking into bpy and I saw that command, but I’m not familiar with the way the script help is organized (I’m more used to maxscript) so any help is appreciated. I’ll have another look so I can see how the arguments are formatted. Much appreciation for the advice.
Are you using Windows?
Could you open Task Manager and sort by memory?
Then start your render and watch the megabit count rise and fall.
After the render, wait several minutes and notice that the number will eventually drop quite a bit.
Interesting, I’ll try that. What do you think it is? A time-delayed cache flush or something? Hmm.
It’s called “garbage collection”
They call it that in Max too. Forgive me, but I fail to see the connection to this and creating a ram preview. peace
Uh… maybe it’s me… I figured a RAM preview is a preview of RAM - memory…
Forgive me, I’m old. And a former programmer. Previewing RAM was important in my job.
Ha…yeah that was funny the way I phrased it. I guess I’m saying yeah, I know that stuff is in ram, but…how do I make a preview of it? That was my original question anyway.
Either way, I appreciate the input. peace