hey guys I’m currently rendering a 3D movie and was wondering what do you guys do when your batch rendering. Do you guys still use your computer while its going on in the background. I don’t know if it will slow down the process if I open up another Maya file and begin working on it.
My current rig is as follows, putting my current rig details up just in-case if the parts effect it much:
12Gb ram, Intel i7 980x extreme edition, GTX 780ti 4GB Zotac power amp edition.
Thanks.
just test it… sometimes its working sometimes not… for example modeling in maya is no problem… working in nuke not…
You should be able to reduce the number of threads that the renderer uses, then it should be no problem - except for the longer render time of course -
Ah yes that’s true I can always set the affinity as well, I was just wondering what everyone else does when they are waiting for a render, because it feels as though I’m wasting time watching the Percentages go by.
Yeah I really should, I did try it but to me it felt a bit slower because the frames went from 1min 10 seconds to 1min 50 seconds.
Yeah thats one thing I love about gpu renders like redshift. Its using gpu, so my computer is completely free to keep working.
Yes, I always work while batch rendering. In some fields you can sit and render, but not construction. My bosses would have a fit, despite me having two Piledrivers at the office for working double-time. Even when both are rendering, they want me busy - or else they’d just get me a third computer, making life even more unwieldy. Two is enough for me, speed-wise.
In Windows, you’re gonna want a process management utility to help out. Task Manager isn’t really enough. I use ProcessLasso, which gives you tons of options and tools and most importantly, lets you easily set your Default Affinity and Priority, and gives you an additional thread for “Responsiveness”. Incidentally, this program alone closed the rendering gap between Win7 and Win8, which was initially 10-20% depending on your CPU. So Win8 is slightly more optimized at the per-thread level, but it was easily corrected here.
Here’s an example, on my 'Dozer at home:
So you set a couple cores OFF for “MayaBatch.exe” and that’s it. It may bog down momentarily on a few things, such as dynamics calcs or texture-loading, but generally it’s at least 95% as responsive once you turn off the first core or so for rendering. On the Piledrivers, since they’re two logical cores, I turn off two. You can probably get away with just one on the i7.
Yeah thats one thing I love about gpu renders like redshift. Its using gpu, so my computer is completely free to keep working.
@Refract: How well does that work if you’re using Viewport 2 and a decent-sized scene, though? 
Wow, I used to batch render ‘at least’ one job in the background while working, playing music (with no skips), and browsing the web - I did no system management at all, just left everything at max cores - back in 2002. It was so unnoticeable that I often forgot something was rendering, and put the computer to sleep. I went months w/o rebooting too. Everything’s so bloated now
“@Refract: How well does that work if you’re using Viewport 2 and a decent-sized scene, though? ;)”
Works amazing with proxy’s like Arnold/Vray. Just faster by exponential numbers. (viewport 2.0 I don’t use on any graphics card because its still slow and not fully implemented yet)
So that’s a “no”. It doesn’t work just fine with Viewport 2, because they fight for the GPU. We all know what GPU renders are, but if you’re going to dodge questions in an attempt to show off, I’m gonna call you on it. OP asked nothing about GPUs.