[BradT]

We're rendering animation sequences with Maxwell via Backburner. At night, workstations contribute to rendering. When we arrive in the morning, we need to shut down the render processes on workstations. Just shutting down the backburner server window leaves the maxwell command application running until a frame completes (hours). Hard-closing the maxwell command window or pressing CTRL-C twice seems to sometimes result in corrupted frames.

What is the best practice for this scenario? Is there any way to cleanly halt the render process without waiting hours for the frame to complete?

Thanks,

Brad.

[rusteberg]

The best way? Or the safest way?

[BradT]

Best AND safest. I'm not sure what the difference is.

[rusteberg]

well, my post above illustrates my sentiment at times as the best way to close something on the pooter. although it might not be the safest. not sure how you're doing it through BB, but if it's not shutting down then you could try closing it out in your system tray?

why wouldn't you send the job through the network monitor? there it's easy to just right click on a node and kill it....

[BradT]

Backburner shuts down without a problem. Maxwell keeps rendering though. It will continue to render until the frame is finished, which might be hours. Is there a way to cleanly shut down maxwell, so that it basically just stops rendering immediately, dumps the current progress into the MXI, and closes nicely?

Manually closing the Maxwell window or ctrl-c + ctrl-c makes it go away, but it might leave corrupted MXI's or partially written image files.
I can't say for sure that improperly closing Maxwell is why I'm getting corrupt frames, but it seems the most likely reason, so if there is a better way to close it, I'd like to know.

On a side note, the reason for using backburner instead of maxwell's own network rendering are:
- Using backburner allows us distribute the process of exporting MXS files from 3ds Max, saving many hours per scene.
- We run other renderers besides Maxwell. MentalRay, FinalRender, and Krakatoa all get frequent use here.

[rusteberg]

i think you might have to manually grab the mxi/images from the node's temp folder AppData/Local/Temp/mxnetwork/rendernode_ABC - dump that where you want it, then force close like you have been doing.....

[kami]

unfortunately it does not sound as if there is a 'safe' way to close it. I haven't used backburner, but not even with the maxwell network rendering system, there is a good way. you could stop the node and the result gets transferred to the server. But there is no automatical resume by another node, which would help a lot ...
what I sometimes do, is removing some cpu cores from the rendering via task manager. like that, the rendering will continue in the background, but will almost not be noticeable during work. but that only works, if you have a huge amount of a ram and are okay with some cores being used by maxwell.
I use that technique for jobs where a frame does not take more than a few hours. if it takes even more, I stop the process and continue with the mxi later ... But that is quite a lot of manual work