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	Mon, 08/Mar/2010 8:41 AM
Anand 7 Posts	Hey Robin, our GUI's seem to be locking up at random times, on random engines during renderings. The render time on the engines continue to run even though the job has finished. Only way to fix, is to close out smedge GUI and restart. Only problem with that is, not sure if the engine as actually finished or not, so by closing GUI it takes the engine offline and cancels that engine’s packet. This stinks in situations where you have to have large packets with long render times. For example... I have a Maya Ocean Scene with particles and such. Takes a long time just to open the scene since has to calculate frames. So to compensate for this, I make the packet sizes huge, like 50 or so. So the time to render these packets take like 3 or so hours and when GUI locks up, we close it and reopen and lose hours of rendering since the job restarts. Also if you happen to accidentally open up two GUIs and close either, it turns the engine offline. Can you add a prompt when closing the GUI that asks the user whether he wants to exit and make engine offline or exit GUI and leave engine online and rendering? Maybe away to change this within the GUI preferences? Also, was this ever added? - Sub-Packet division If a packet is partway finished when it stops (either stopped by a user or failed), when that packet is started again it will start in the middle of the packet it was working on, instead of repeating the part that already succeeded. Use of this depends on the Product being able to report enough information to Smedge, but would include much of the current stable of Products. This would really be helpful since we also use our workstations to help render and if we need full power back while working on them for other applications, it would be nice not having to wait til the packet completed and instead cancel without losing the whole packet. Thanks, Adam Edited by author on Mon, 08/Mar/2010 8:48 AM
	Mon, 08/Mar/2010 11:29 PM
Robin 711 Posts	Several issues of locking up have been addressed in Smedge 2010 update 1, and more will be in the forthcoming Update 2, which is not officially on the schedule yet, but will be out shortly. I can add that prompt. You can set this yourself in the SmedgeGui options, and you can also create an INI file that you copy to your machines: [ Configuration ] Engine = 2 I can also add a single instancer check to SmedgeGui, at least for an individual user. Sub packet division is planned for Smedge 2011, probably in the summer update (part of the release schedule for the next Smedge), though that's open to change. Higher priority currently is stay-resident rendering, which will speed up render times and remove the need for "packet size" for several products. Can you cache your simulations? Caching to individual frame files can help render times, and allow smaller packet sizes. -robin
	Thu, 11/Mar/2010 7:48 AM
Anand 7 Posts	Thanks for looking into this Robin! Can't wait for the 2011 release! We have been meaning to upgrade to Update 1 but have not had the chance too. Will let you know if that fixes our issues. We could cache the particles and fluid sim, but in our business, our clients and engineers always has a last sec change that doesn't allow us to cache them. So there is an option not to disable an engine when closing the GUI? Can you point me to where that resides? Thanks, Adam
	Thu, 11/Mar/2010 4:00 PM
Robin 711 Posts	The option is in the SmedgeGui Options dialog box. On the General Options tab, near the bottom, is a field "Start the Engine on Startup". Set this to "Start it to run until you log out". -robin
	Fri, 12/Mar/2010 6:00 AM
Anand 7 Posts	Got it! Thanks Again!

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