Agent versions 2.16 and later offer increased control over what frames you want rendered. We now support rendering every N frames of a range. While you could accomplish this previously by entering a comma-separated list of specific frame numbers you wanted rendered, that was unwieldy for large frame ranges. Now, you can simply say “1 to 100 by 5” or “1:100 by 5” to get every 5th frame between 1 and 100 rendered out. Examples of the various formats you can use to control your frame list are:
- 1:100
- 1-100
- 1 to 100
- 1:100:5
- 1:100 by 5
- 1-100-5
- 1-100 by 5
- 1 to 100 by 5
- 1-100,5 (this would render 1 through 100 and 5…again)
- 1,10,38,53,178
- 1,10,38,53,178,200-300 by 10
Hopefully this flexibility gives you more of what you want. Since we have added this capability, we expanded on it a bit in our support of Terragen. You can now render sparse GI caches on our farm. Our agent detects when your scene file uses GI and presents an additional field that allows you to specify a GI frame list. By default, the GI frame list field will populate identically to the frame list field, so our system would pre-render and store a GI cache for each frame. If your scene can benefit from a sparse GI cache, however, you may change that to have our system only render and cache every N frames worth of GI. Refer to Planetside documentation for why you would use a sparse GI cache:
We hope you enjoy the increased control afforded by the Pixel Plow render farm service.
