Mantra rendering problem

[Tom]

I have a scene, wich takes VERY long time to start rendering, all it does is calculating this "composition"

The scene is rendering smoke, where 3 cached containers are merged together. I already rendered some frames, but it somehow stopped rendering them, first time it only took 10mins to do this composition. I think its somethnig to do with cache file merging, because before that it was rendering nicely each cache.

Edited July 21, 2013 by Tom

[Guest tar]

Compositing can mean it's rendering... for example on a 100 frame render, "Compositing 30%" = 30 frames have rendered.

[Fabiano Berlim]

If you're rendering exr files, you can use the OpenExr Display to view frames that are still rendering. That's a good solution if you don't want to stop frames in the middle of the process.

[Scratch]

Sorry to drop in, but that's cool! I allways wanted to have some sort of visualisation while rendering is still in progress.

Do you mean this programm here? http://www.openexr.com/downloads.html -> openexr_viewers-2.0.0.0?

In Vray (I'm using it for Maya) for example, you can see the progress in the frame-buffer while it is rendering (nice because you can see instantly when something is going wrong). Is there a way to display the renderprogress in e.g. mplay while rendering a sequence?

[Fabiano Berlim]

Yep! That's the one. The name of the package is "openexr_viewers" and the name of the executable is "exrdisplay".

At least for Ubuntu OpenExr is inside app source list, so there's no need to compile. If you're using any Linux distro check if it is there too.

Cheers