Our studio currently uses 120 cores dedicated to NR at all times and plans to double that over the next year. NR is a huge part of our success and we're thankful for it.
That being said, we'd love to see the following features;
1.) Multiple Job Jumping in the Queue
Right now, an administrator (or anyone logged in as one) can go in and move jobs up and down in the queue, one by one. This is nice to have, but would be a huuuuge time saver if we could jump multiple jobs in one click, by say, grabbing jobs 2-30 and moving them down below jump 31, making job #31, next in line.
We often have 2 or 3 designers/artists adding things to the queue at any given time, and as the queue gets longer, sometimes priorities will change on the fly, and suddenly the job which is stuck in 56th position needs to be moved up. It is a total time suck as you can imagine when you have to manually move that job up 55 times.
2.) Pausing the Processing of a Job
I know this was temporarily a feature in KS NR 7.0 and was taken away when the NR reverted back to what it is now. I know you can somewhat 'pause' a job by jumping it in the queue, but if it is currently working on a task, it will finish that task, right? Being able to pause a job mid-render would give us some real flexibility when job priorities change. This is especially true on those certain jobs where the last region or two just seem to take forever, but you'd hate to cancel the job and lose all of the progress. Which is a great segway into feature #3...
3.) Being able to download a job before it is completed
There have been some cases, where a render on the network is just taking a long time, perhaps it went overnight, some settings were a bit extreme, etc. And it is finally down to the last one or two regions, but it is in a tough spot, maybe an overly complex material resides in that spot. Well, we let it run all night...do we let it go for a couple more hours, tie up the queue even longer? Or should we cut our loses, cancel the job and lose all of the progress on the rest of the image. It happens more than we like to admit. The solution would be, ability to download the image (unfinished) and missing some regions. Perhaps those regions just get filled in Black and we need to send a patch to the queue later, which is a heck of a lot better position to be in, than losing the rest of the image because one area was problematic.
Hope some of that would be productive. I know it seems simple to me to make this happen, but I am not a developer, and I know things all are all intertwined. Thoughts?
