Background Render Mode

[omerpekin]

Hi,

I can't find much information about 'background rendering'.

Currently, it is rendering a frame and I can see the files saved. Where do I see a progress bar, a percentage indicator or anything that shows me what the software is doing?

Also are there differences to the background mode to the normal one other that it being slow?

[mattjgerard]

Couple of things-

There's really not much to background rendering, it is basically offloading the render job to a different instance of the render engine so that the main keyshot interface is left open to continue working.

render progress bar is in the lower right, the green checkmasrk in the upper left will appear when the render is done, it will be a red X while the render is in progress.
I usually tend to have my system monitor open as well, so i can see the CPU usage. As for being slow, I haven't done any side by side direct comparisons, but it is not doing/using anything different than the realitime preview renderer, so it should not be slower than not using background rendering. The couple things to watch for is
to double check the CPU usage in the render settings, and make sure it didn't get knocked down somehow. I usually don't keep it at 100%, because if I'm using the background render, there's a good chance I'll be doing something else on my workstation while this is rendering. If its at 100% my machine is virtually unusable, which is good for my render times, bad for my admin and email work that i need to do too. My machine has 24 cores, so I will set it to use 22. That gives me enough to open another keyshot doc, and continue to prep my next scene.I love the background render, it should be turned on by default in my opinion, there's really no reason not to use it.

[richardfunnell]

Hey Matt,

Just out of curiosity, is there any reason you wouldn't just use the local queue instead? That way you can work at full speed to prep all your images/animations then let the queue run when you're done with the prep side of things.

[mattjgerard]

I've honestly used both,  and for some reason I've drifted to the background render method. I think its the way my brain naturally works, in smaller chunks.  I routinely run projects with 30 or so different cad docs, and need renders of all of them individually, and each setup takes me 5-10 min, hit background render, close that doc, open the next one, prep it, hit background render, etc....

Biggest issue thought is that the render queue locks me out of closing the current keyshot doc and continue working in that instance of the app. I know I can open another instance of KS, but I try to avoid doing that just because of app load times (I'm very impatient when it comes to that. I still think that KS should have some way to open multiple docs in one instance of KS, not having to launch multiple instances to open multiple docs. Think that would make copy/paste materials/settings/coordinates between different open documents easier ( and possible) But I'm not a programmer, so that might be ludicrous


Is it correct to say that when rendering multiple images using the background render it does them in parallel whereas the render queue will render them in series, one after another?

I will use the render queue if I stack a bunch of projects up at the end of the day and let it run overnight. Just wondering if there is a reason that background rendering is even an option if the local queue is the better way to go? Any benefits to it?  Regardless, we just put in the requisition for the network render node, so this might all not even matter in a month!