Wait! You can't just press Render Animation

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
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I’ve been bitten in the ass a few more times that I would like with Blender.
1st time I press render.
I just deleted the previous render that ran all night.
2d time rendering animation.
I forgot to uncheck transparent film.
Third time I press render.
I forgot to set the subdivide.
4th render.
I didn’t reset the exposure and didn’t show until it got to the tunnel scene.
5th render.
I forgot to check denoising.
6th render.
Everything looks good now but why is it taking so long? I didn’t check simplify.
7th render.
I didn’t set the resolution to 100%
8th render.
Why does my character look so weird? I didn’t apply mirror.
9th render.
I turned off something in the Outliner. Now there’s a tree missing!

This didn’t happen to me every time but way more often than I wish. And I’m sure other things I forgotten then revealed in the fictional but all too common retry list.

I’m getting better, sometimes I go to hit render animation then I freeze… Wait! You can’t just do that. Now I have to be an airline pilot and take out my checklist before takeoff.

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Hahaha welcome to the 3D animation world :smiley:
With time you’ll manage to keep things more organized and things will be better, but there is soo much parameters , it’s common to forget something even after years of daily practice :smiley:

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To this end, I sometimes wonder if we could … probably through a Python plug-in … create some idea of “settings banks.” In other words, just make one drop-down menu selection somewhere in the UI and all of those pesky settings instantly get set correctly. Because the OP is entirely correct … “it’s a great big time-waster,” especially when render times are already going to be long.

It’s one thing to spend time, but quite another thing to find that you have just wasted it due to an oversight or a mistake. And mistakes are easy: many of the settings are “all over the place” in the UI.

(Of course it would not surprise me that such a plug-in already exists …?)

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I’ve seen a few add-one with render presets, like that, but it’s generally part of a larger and more complex system. Just having a customizable render checklist is a very good idea :thinking: I might look into that, see what can I figure out

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Hi.
I don’t know if you know this, but you can do a quick OpenGL viewport render from header “View” menu and “Viewport Render Animation” (first select Camera View and disable Show overlays)

With this you will be able to quickly realize some of the oversights and mistakes that you made. Or render with Eevee with only 1 Render Sample.

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Yes , that along with rendering one frame can help a lot to spot mistakes…

Yes, it’s something I used a lot in production, basically it’s a script that is run at render time on the renderfarm.
Another great common tool is a sanity checker, that test the .blend for common mistakes and tries to report or automatically fix them.
But all of this is quite customized to a project. It’s hard to include every possible mistakes, or make something generic enough to be useful. You’ll end up with a quarter of blender’s UI.

I think it’s a good habit to get used to check what you’re doing. When I started working I tend to render a video from after effect and send it to the edit right away. I’ve learned the hard way to check everything I rendered out, because even if I was confident it was good, it was full of mistakes.

Furthermore , a script can’t find if a modifier is disabled by mistake or if it’s intended.
And there is a bunch of similar things in a 3D scene.

So yeah, it’s part of the boring stuff to learn to stay organised when you work with complex tools like blender.

At some point, doing these presets could be a great way to learn python , it’s quite simple to do. The more professional/experienced you get, the more you can create your own tools to deal with these kind of situation. Or find your ways to stay organized, it’s important at very different levels, a good part of what makes a good result in CG is how to organize things.

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When I started writing this I was thinking about Wizards. The step by step guide that asks you questions for settings related to the task at hand.

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:slight_smile: I see the idea !
The thing is that there is only a few things common to every project. So making something usable to many would be either incomplete or too lengthy …

In the end I think it’s better to learn to stay organized, it gets better with time. I don’t see me being annoyed too much by forgetting something now, but indeed at the beginning that appended to me more often.

Maybe that comes from the fact that now I iterate a lot on a sequence. I try to make animated renders early , in low res if needed. So if something is missing or buggy, I can always enable it / fix it for the next time. And in the mean time, the render is generally enough to give me an idea of what to fix in my animation, lighting ect…

But maybe if you want to stick with this wizard idea, you may start to draw that list of questions… That would give a better view of what tool/script can be made to help. And if that’s too complicated at least you’ll get your own checklist before rendering :slight_smile:

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The advantage is to avoid hunting for settings and have a box that asks you what you want seems kinda appealing.

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Yes, it can be interesting to draw that checklist first. What questions would that assistant ask, or what to look for …

But think about it, when you start learning modeling there are tons of mistakes than you can do, like superposed geometry, wrong normals , non-manifold geo, N-gons with subdivisions …
Having something that can check all this may help a bit someone who’s starting, but after one year of practice it’s something that you’re used to and most of them you generally avoid naturally. And that’s so tied with modeling that you should know by heart how to avoid them and why it’s bad.

So yeah, some kind of assistant could be helpful to learn blender and try to get users learning best practices from the start. Even tho making such thing is a lot of work that someone need to put efforts into.

And as said, similar tools are used on a more professional level in many production company. So it’s not a bad idea in the end.

Still, I’m convinced that a lot of CG is learnt the hard way by experimenting and making mistakes, that doesn’t mean it should be hard all the way along. But that’s really tied with the craft. So failing and loosing time in the beginning isn’t a bad thing IMO. That forces you to stay organized and learn problem solving.
I’ve seen many posts here about some issues, and when you look at the screen capture the user send, it’s a modifier or object disabled at render. Of course maybe a clever assistant can point out it the right direction. But what append when the assistant isn’t clever enough… Better be used to these things right from the start I think. I spend a good third of my time in troubleshooting on every projects, because 3D is artistic and technical. The more complex the scene is getting, the more chances are that something break without notice.

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No it shouldn’t be about repairing problems it should be about making you aware of how the system is set up. In car terms not a diagnostic tool but more like a dashboard, where you know at a glance what is doing where.

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Ok ! I don’t want to make that thread spin in circles, but what information that dashboard would provide then ?

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This one is all to familar. I think it would be a great help if, when the current render slot is already full, a warning window would pop up when you click “Render” that says the current render slot is already full and asks for a confirmation if you want to render or not. Kinda like what happens when you try and close an unsaved file.

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Typically the window says:
“There is already a file with that name do you wish to overwrite it?”
[ OK ] [ Cancel ]

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No, I’m not talking about when saving a file (though I’ve messed things up there as well), I’m talking about when you click render it deletes everything in the current render slot so that it has a place to render. And of course if you just had something rendering all night in the current render slot and then you accidentally click render, you lost that render that took all night.

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This step I don’t know why Blender doesn’t have such a thing:
“There is already a file with that name do you wish to overwrite it?”
[ OK ] [ Cancel ]

I would make it customizable to the user as a “Add to render dialog” and have it appear as a stop window with bullet points.

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Same difference. When you overwrite a file or render both methods delete the current file then replace it with the new one.

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Ha yes ! Indeed ! An addon can probably do that !

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I have a written checklist which I go through to make sure that all of the necessary settings have been made properly, but it’s a bit tedious.

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yes to a written checklist.

I totally recognize OP’s pattern here and have done it a thousand times. They best way I have found to reduce the amount of re-rendering I need to do is to take the time to fully review my failed renders. Once I see an issue with my render, I often want to jump right to fixing that and re-rendering.

The thing is, you could have noticed every issue you described after the first failure.

Rough drafts are a thing for a reason. They give you an opportunity to see many issues all at once, mark them up, and then correct all of them before rendering

I will set the resolution to 25%, turn the samples way down and render the full animation.

Once this draft render is done, then I will watch it, looking for any issues. When I spot one, I will write it down, Then I watch it again, looking for anything else, and I repeat the process, making a list of everything I want to change.

When you can’t find anything else, you can hop back into your scene and work item by item, correcting things and checking them off the list. Then you can re-render, again at preview resolution.

Now repeat the process, see if there are any issues you missed, or if any fixes had any unintended consequences. Watch it repeatedly, build up a checklist, then re-render another preview.

Once you see no issues with your preview animation, now you can render your final resolution and sample quality.

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