Update render settings while an animation is being rendered

Support Lighting and Rendering
#1

Hi!

I just rendered an animation with around 70 computers in our school.

First I thought I would have only time to render 400 frames but it went faster than I thought so I changed the frame range to incorporate 500 frames and saved the file on each computer.

Here’s the problem:
Blender did not pick up on that change on any of the computers. Instead it just stopped when the frames reached the amount defined earlier.

So here’s the question:
Is there a way to make Blender recognize an update to the render settings (especially the from-to frame range value) while the computer is rendering?

If not, then is there a way to tell Blender to stop after the current frame is finnished? I hate the idea of stopping a render while a frame is still being made because of the lost amount processing time (each frame takes 45-55 minutes to render).

#2

No, you can’t. Once you click on the “Render Animation” button, Blender will go until the end of the task… unless you interrupt it. Changing the settings won’t do anything. Actually, there’s a lot you can do, even messing with your scene (up to a certain point) without disturbing Blender. In general, Blender sucks the CPU/GPU dry while rendering so you can’t do much but it’s possible.

However, unless you want to change some fundamental settings like the size of the image, the number of samples, the layers or what-not, you don’t need to interrupt Blender. You just let it finish what it’s doing and then you restart only for the frames you need. If that’s more frames, so be it. It works.

Of course, you must render your animation as frames into a folder. If you encode directly to a video format, you have no choice but to restart from the beginning. Period.