ManFriday's Render Queue (the old one from 2019) [Commercial]

ManFriday

atenzagame said:

Set up two scenes and start, DAZ restarts when the first rendering is over,
At that time, two command prompts are displayed, whereby two DAZ are activated at the same time, and rendering is also performed in duplicate.
I always have this phenomenon.

Thank you for the report. Others have reported similar issues. This should be fixed by the next update, which is in testing at Daz and will hopefully come out soon.

L'Adair

ManFriday said:

L'Adair said:

@ManFriday I've got another suggestion, something to consider for a future update. It looks like the script is using the "id" for the camera(s) on the end of the image filename, but what if it used the "label" instead?

You're totally right, I used the wrong API call. It won't be in the fix that's currently at Daz but in the version afterwards. Thank you!

And thank you for this script. I woke up this morning with my computer shut down, the render complete. I expect it won't be long before the energy costs saved will have paid for this script. I'm really looking forward to a lower utility bill. (Two computers, one that often times runs 36-48 hours between shutdowns.)

gitika1

From the first day, the description put this on my wishlist.  However, I held off waiting a bit to hear what more frequent users had to say.  (My time to play is DS is miniscule because of RL commitments.) I don't know when I will have something ready to render, but I am impressed with your dedication and quick responses, and I purchased it.

Dimokin

As some above I too have the multiple render problems, did put some scenes in over night, and came back to dozens of daz windows and alot of unfinished renders, haha. What kind of information do you need, if any at all?

L'Adair

For the first time when running this script, I put two scenes in the queue. The second image is rendering now. I'm not seeing multiple renders or multiple instances of Daz Studio open. I don't use Daz Connect, so I'm never logged in; I'm not rendering Canvases; and these images both have only one camera.

Daz Studio 4.11.0.236
Intel Core i7-6900K CPU | GTX1080 | 64GB RAM | Win10Pro x64

ManFriday

Alright, here's a summary of the current state of things.

The Render Queue doesn't seem to be waiting long enough when restarting Daz Studio for some people's configurations. What currently happens is that the Render Queue creates a batch file that sleeps five seconds and then restarts Daz Studio. After creating that batch file, the Render Queue launches the batch file and then exits the current Daz Studio process. If Daz Studio crashes while exiting, an error box can pop up and the first Daz Studio process is still in memory when the second one starts, which can lead to conflicts with too many Daz Connect logins. Also, the five seconds wait is too short for Daz Studio to exit properly, which can also lead to error messages.

So, the next update will hopefully fix these two problems. Until then, maybe disabling "Automatically Login" in the Daz Connect dialog ("Connect" -> "Login") helps.

What's NOT in that update yet:

• making the Render Queue window more polite and not stay on top all the time;
• making appending the camera name to the output file name optional;
• append the camera label instead of the internal name (bugfix);
• adding an option to shut down DS when the queue is complete.

L'Adair

ManFriday said:

The Render Queue doesn't seem to be waiting long enough when restarting Daz Studio for some people's configurations. What currently happens is that the Render Queue creates a batch file that sleeps five seconds and then restarts Daz Studio. After creating that batch file, the Render Queue launches the batch file and then exits the current Daz Studio process. If Daz Studio crashes while exiting, an error box can pop up and the first Daz Studio process is still in memory when the second one starts, which can lead to conflicts with too many Daz Connect logins. Also, the five seconds wait is too short for Daz Studio to exit properly, which can also lead to error messages.

So, the next update will hopefully fix these two problems. Until then, maybe disabling "Automatically Login" in the Daz Connect dialog ("Connect" -> "Login") helps.

This update is showing up in DIM for me. Just thought I'd let you guys know.

ManFriday

L'Adair said:

 

This update is showing up in DIM for me. Just thought I'd let you guys know.

Yes, thank you! Daz just pushed it a while ago.

Leonides02

Hello @ManFriday! Thanks for this product. I used it last night and everything seems to work fairly well except my smoothing modifiers didn't apply at all. To be safe, I'd even asked the program to wait a full minute for it to settle down.

Has anyone else reported this as an issue?

DoctorJellybean

Ok, the update seems to be much more stable with the longer timeout and other options. I queued 3 scenes last night, the first one was fine. The last 2 however used the Perspective View, even they both have active cams.

I did a quick experiment this morning, and what appears to be happening is that if a scene was saved in Perspective View, that is how it is rendered, even though there is an Active camera. It renders fine when saved in Active Camera view.

What would be nice is an icon for the menu bar entry.

Kaimetsuo

I still cannot get the render queue to work for me. It goes through steps 1-6 just fine, but, upon closing DAZ, it simply does nothing. It does not launch the .bat file. It does not spit back an error of any kind. It just craps out and goes dormant, and I can't figure out why. Do you have any suggestions that might make diagnosing the problem a little easier? Failing that, my rig is beefy enough that it can handle running several renders back-to-back without shutting down DAZ; is there any way that Render Queue could be configured to simply clear the scene instead of completely shutting the program down?

andya_b341b7c5f5

Leonides02 said:

Hello @ManFriday! Thanks for this product. I used it last night and everything seems to work fairly well except my smoothing modifiers didn't apply at all. To be safe, I'd even asked the program to wait a full minute for it to settle down.

Has anyone else reported this as an issue?

I haven't bought this product (yet), but when tinkering with a batch render script for my own use last year I ran into issues with applying smoothing modifiers, and just waiting (even for 20 minutes!) did not seem to work reliably, I would still get lots of pokethrough.  The fix I found to be most reliable was to set the Interactive Update property to On for all nodes with smoothing enabled.  Voila, no more pokethrough, but no clue why it worked.  Though this won't help you immediately, just offering this as a potential pointer for a solution if this proves to be a tricky issue to deal with.  YMMV.

DoctorJellybean

Kaimetsuo said:

I still cannot get the render queue to work for me. It goes through steps 1-6 just fine, but, upon closing DAZ, it simply does nothing. It does not launch the .bat file. It does not spit back an error of any kind. It just craps out and goes dormant, and I can't figure out why. Do you have any suggestions that might make diagnosing the problem a little easier? Failing that, my rig is beefy enough that it can handle running several renders back-to-back without shutting down DAZ; is there any way that Render Queue could be configured to simply clear the scene instead of completely shutting the program down?

Are you saying that after the first render in the queue, DS closes but doesn't restart?

ManFriday

Kaimetsuo said:

I still cannot get the render queue to work for me. It goes through steps 1-6 just fine, but, upon closing DAZ, it simply does nothing. It does not launch the .bat file. It does not spit back an error of any kind. It just craps out and goes dormant, and I can't figure out why. Do you have any suggestions that might make diagnosing the problem a little easier? Failing that, my rig is beefy enough that it can handle running several renders back-to-back without shutting down DAZ; is there any way that Render Queue could be configured to simply clear the scene instead of completely shutting the program down?

I'm very sorry to hear that. Could you look up in your system temp path whether the .bat file exists? It should at C:\Users\%USER%\AppData\Local\Temp\mfrq-restart.bat where %USER% is your Windows user name. The AppData folder is hidden so you will need to turn on hidden files in Windows Explorer in the user folder to see it (or type the full path in the Explorer's location bar).

Also I'd be interested in your Windows version (7, 8, 10), 32 bits or 64 bits, and which Daz Studio version you're running.

I'm sorry for the inconvenience!

ManFriday

Leonides02 said:

Hello @ManFriday! Thanks for this product. I used it last night and everything seems to work fairly well except my smoothing modifiers didn't apply at all. To be safe, I'd even asked the program to wait a full minute for it to settle down.

Has anyone else reported this as an issue?

No, this one is new.

andya_b341b7c5f5 said:

 

I haven't bought this product (yet), but when tinkering with a batch render script for my own use last year I ran into issues with applying smoothing modifiers, and just waiting (even for 20 minutes!) did not seem to work reliably, I would still get lots of pokethrough.  The fix I found to be most reliable was to set the Interactive Update property to On for all nodes with smoothing enabled.  Voila, no more pokethrough, but no clue why it worked.  Though this won't help you immediately, just offering this as a potential pointer for a solution if this proves to be a tricky issue to deal with.  YMMV.

This is actually what the Render Queue does in between loading a scene and waiting for the scene to settle down. It goes through every node in the scene and turns on interactive update if the parameter is present in the node. I have tested it with lots and lots of scenes and it worked here.

@Leonides02, what kind of node has smoothing enabled in your scene? Is it clothing or something else? Maybe something's different in your scenes compared to the ones that I worked with.

Thank you!

Leonides02

andya_b341b7c5f5 said:

The fix I found to be most reliable was to set the Interactive Update property to On for all nodes with smoothing enabled.  Voila, no more pokethrough, but no clue why it worked.  Though this won't help you immediately, just offering this as a potential pointer for a solution if this proves to be a tricky issue to deal with.  YMMV.

That's interesting, @andya_b341b7c5f5! I've seen that property before but never used it or even know what it meant. I'll give that a try. ManFriday, have you encountered any issues with smoothing?

andya_b341b7c5f5

ManFriday said:

This is actually what the Render Queue does in between loading a scene and waiting for the scene to settle down. It goes through every node in the scene and turns on interactive update if the parameter is present in the node. I have tested it with lots and lots of scenes and it worked here.

OK, good, that's what worked for me, and you already have that wrinkle covered.  I'm sure your testing was more extensive than mine - I was just scratching an itch with no intention of releasing anything commercially - but I didn't come across any scenes where it didn't work either, at least in curing poke through.

Leonides02

ManFriday said:

This is actually what the Render Queue does in between loading a scene and waiting for the scene to settle down. It goes through every node in the scene and turns on interactive update if the parameter is present in the node. I have tested it with lots and lots of scenes and it worked here.

@Leonides02, what kind of node has smoothing enabled in your scene? Is it clothing or something else? Maybe something's different in your scenes compared to the ones that I worked with.

Thank you!

Gosh, I'm sorry. I didn't see this response. It was a primitive cube which I was using smoothing / collission to make indents for the person on top of the bed. . 

P.S. I should add I rendered another scene last night using that method and it appeared to work perfectly. 

 

Mart1n71

I’m still getting duplicate instances of Daz opening after more complex scenes, even after the update. Also, I’m noticing if I queue a list of files name scene1, scene1.1, scene1.2 etc, all the renders will be named scene1 overwriting the previous render.

ManFriday

Mart1n71 said:

I’m still getting duplicate instances of Daz opening after more complex scenes, even after the update. Also, I’m noticing if I queue a list of files name scene1, scene1.1, scene1.2 etc, all the renders will be named scene1 overwriting the previous render.

Have you tried the settings available from the new "Options" button at the bottom left of the Render Queue window?

I have noted down the problem with the dots in the filenames.

Kaimetsuo

 

DoctorJellybean said:

 Are you saying that after the first render in the queue, DS closes but doesn't restart?

Yes, that is precisely what I am saying.

 

ManFriday said:

I'm very sorry to hear that. Could you look up in your system temp path whether the .bat file exists? It should at C:\Users\%USER%\AppData\Local\Temp\mfrq-restart.bat where %USER% is your Windows user name. The AppData folder is hidden so you will need to turn on hidden files in Windows Explorer in the user folder to see it (or type the full path in the Explorer's location bar).

Also I'd be interested in your Windows version (7, 8, 10), 32 bits or 64 bits, and which Daz Studio version you're running.

I'm sorry for the inconvenience!

Is this a *different* mfrq-restart.bat than the one you had me look for originally? Regardless, it's still there and it still starts DAZ; it just doesn't launch when render queue closes DAZ after a render. I'm still running Windows 10 Home for 64 bit. I'm still using DAZ 4.10.0.107 Pro.

LenioTG

This product is really interesting, but I have already bought Batch Renderer some time ago.

What do you think guys? Is it worth the upgrade?

Leonides02

TGFan4 said:

This product is really interesting, but I have already bought Batch Renderer some time ago.

What do you think guys? Is it worth the upgrade?

Overall, ManFriday's product works better and has more features. It was worth the upgrade to me!

ebonartgallery

ManFriday said:

You can cancel each render if you think it has enough iterations, and the render queue will still keep going (unless you cancel the entire render queue in its progress window as well).

How can you do this? I've tried the cancel button on the rendered picture, but all that does is close daz and start the next pic, which destroys the pic it was rendering. 

ManFriday said:

 

SamWM

I find this plugin works fairly well, though have a few issues and a suggestion: When rendering a scene with multiple cameras, local camera dimensions don't seem to be used, only the one set in render settings. Shut down computer checkbox appears to clear itself when rendering multiple cameras and there is only one scene in the queue (I have not tried multiple scenes though). Maybe it should be possible to set 'shut down computer' before you start to render? I have version 1.1.0 (9th April)

drayab1000_f384f6bac6

TGFan4 said:

This product is really interesting, but I have already bought Batch Renderer some time ago.

What do you think guys? Is it worth the upgrade?

I like Render Queue better than Batch Renderer mainly because it saves the 'to-do list.' With Batch Renderer, I keep a separate file with all the renders that are ready to go, and my last step of work is to set up Batch Renderer to do its thing. When I get back to Daz, I have to check how many renders finished and then update my to-do list manually. Render Queue has the to-do list built-in, and when you halt it in the middle of progress, it has the status of each render displayed for you, so I don't need to do extra work to find out what happened. None of this is hard to do, but it's a nice convenience. IMO, the downside of Render Queue is that when it is running, it keeps a progress box open that is an extreme focus hog. Even if you minimize Daz, the Render Queue progress box stays on top of everything. The work around is to move it to the corner of your display so it's not in the way, but this is not an ideal solution. I still use Render Queue over Batch Renderer because the annoyance of the focus hog progress box is less than the convenience of the built-in to-do list. :D

LenioTG

Useful tips, thank you guys! :D

drayab1000_f384f6bac6 said:

I like Render Queue better than Batch Renderer mainly because it saves the 'to-do list.' With Batch Renderer, I keep a separate file with all the renders that are ready to go, and my last step of work is to set up Batch Renderer to do its thing. When I get back to Daz, I have to check how many renders finished and then update my to-do list manually. Render Queue has the to-do list built-in, and when you halt it in the middle of progress, it has the status of each render displayed for you, so I don't need to do extra work to find out what happened. None of this is hard to do, but it's a nice convenience. IMO, the downside of Render Queue is that when it is running, it keeps a progress box open that is an extreme focus hog. Even if you minimize Daz, the Render Queue progress box stays on top of everything. The work around is to move it to the corner of your display so it's not in the way, but this is not an ideal solution. I still use Render Queue over Batch Renderer because the annoyance of the focus hog progress box is less than the convenience of the built-in to-do list. :D

If you're using Windows 10, have you tried to create another desktop?

ManFriday

Kaimetsuo said:

 

ManFriday said:

I'm very sorry to hear that. Could you look up in your system temp path whether the .bat file exists? It should at C:\Users\%USER%\AppData\Local\Temp\mfrq-restart.bat where %USER% is your Windows user name. The AppData folder is hidden so you will need to turn on hidden files in Windows Explorer in the user folder to see it (or type the full path in the Explorer's location bar).

Also I'd be interested in your Windows version (7, 8, 10), 32 bits or 64 bits, and which Daz Studio version you're running.

I'm sorry for the inconvenience!

Is this a *different* mfrq-restart.bat than the one you had me look for originally? Regardless, it's still there and it still starts DAZ; it just doesn't launch when render queue closes DAZ after a render. I'm still running Windows 10 Home for 64 bit. I'm still using DAZ 4.10.0.107 Pro.

Sent you a private message to narrow down this problem.

ManFriday

drayab1000_f384f6bac6 said:

 

I like Render Queue better than Batch Renderer mainly because it saves the 'to-do list.' With Batch Renderer, I keep a separate file with all the renders that are ready to go, and my last step of work is to set up Batch Renderer to do its thing. When I get back to Daz, I have to check how many renders finished and then update my to-do list manually. Render Queue has the to-do list built-in, and when you halt it in the middle of progress, it has the status of each render displayed for you, so I don't need to do extra work to find out what happened. None of this is hard to do, but it's a nice convenience. IMO, the downside of Render Queue is that when it is running, it keeps a progress box open that is an extreme focus hog. Even if you minimize Daz, the Render Queue progress box stays on top of everything. The work around is to move it to the corner of your display so it's not in the way, but this is not an ideal solution. I still use Render Queue over Batch Renderer because the annoyance of the focus hog progress box is less than the convenience of the built-in to-do list. :D

I'm glad you like the Render Queue, and I'll have a fix for the greedy focus problem in the next version :-)

ManFriday

SamWM said:

I find this plugin works fairly well, though have a few issues and a suggestion: When rendering a scene with multiple cameras, local camera dimensions don't seem to be used, only the one set in render settings. Shut down computer checkbox appears to clear itself when rendering multiple cameras and there is only one scene in the queue (I have not tried multiple scenes though). Maybe it should be possible to set 'shut down computer' before you start to render? I have version 1.1.0 (9th April)

I'll have to test this, give me a couple of days.