Reply To: SciFi Room Challenge – Zapped reality – WIP

That is so agonising when that happens.

Top Tip:

     Turn off power saving modes when rendering.

Top Tip Two:

     Turn off Windows auto updates.

Top Tip Three:

     Pray.

Bonus Tip:

     When rendering a long animation, and I need my computer during the day, I would render as a PNG image sequence. Set the frames in the timeline to start at 1 and end at maybe 300, Render overnight, then the following night render 301 to 601 and so on until its done. I always shut down my computer for a while before I do a night render. By shutting down the computer this will clear the memory, cool down the CPU and GPU which helps to eliminate any other issues.

If rendering at the weekend I would render night and day, shutting down for a while in between.

Be sure to set a folder to save the image sequence to, DON’T leave it at the default  /tmp\. This is a temporary folder and depending on your computer settings will delete the files on shutdown or after a specified period of time.

When the rendering is done, I take the image sequence in to Blender’s Video Editing, add SFX and any other effects, then render MP4. This render then takes almost no time to complete.

And I mostly use the denoising node in compositing, it can speed up render times considerably.

And I would render 5 or 10 random frames from the animation so I can calculate an estimated time for the whole animation.

Hope this helps, not only for the next project but maybe this one, especially tip three.

Good luck @slenaerts