Please help, I am so screwed!!!!!

[jtroupe]

I just spent 30+ hours rendering a scene. I came to my computer this morning to find it had finished rendering. So I closed Max, opened up Photoshop to start some post-rendering work to discover that the rendering had not been saved to a file. I had forgotten to check'Save to File' in Max. Is there any way to retrieve that rendering???

 

I can't believe I just did that.

[lxgrunger]

nope. Render it again

[David Knourek]

AFAIK if you dont hit the save to file check box then the frames are just written to memory where each frame will be basicly deleted as the next frame was rendered, and even if you still had max open the only thing you would be able to recover would be the last frame rendered...

 

Sorry for your loss,

 

-dave

[John Dollus]

30 hours for one image?! This industry seems to be going backwards in time....

[NOOXY]

man what a delimer...guess that's another 30 hours down the drain...Good luck man..hope to see this 30 hour image soon;)

[wilky9]

since you double posted your thread, but don't seem to have looked at the other one, I'll double post my reply

 

"there is the "Show last rendering" button in the render panel, but if you've already closed MAX, then yes you might be screwed."

[STRAT]

i'll always leave max or cinema still open after it's finished rendering while i open photoshop to play with my image. this way if it didnt save the image when you get to photoshop you'll still have it open in the backround.

 

although, pointless telling you after the event

[3DIFX]

You've probably already restarted your render, but I was thinking that it may benefit you to use the "net render" option since your rendering is taking 30 hours to render - that is if you have more than one computer at your disposal. It is really easy to set up (check the help files for max). This way you can render out "strips" of your image to several computers and it won't take as long. Once the final strip is rendered it automatically sews the images together. Make sure that one strip will take no longer than 600 minutes to render because it will "time out" (basically quit and start over)after then. So make sure that you specify the correct amount of strips to render. A few good things about this are that the strips can be saved (all is not lost on a crash), the strips can be manually stitched if need be, and most of all it will warn you if you haven't "Saved to file".

[AJLynn]

Also, with some renderers you get a distributed bucket function - Vray and mental ray do this - that's usually more efficient but sometimes more difficult to work with.

 

30 hours isn't completely unreasonable - depends on your lighting and materials, and your resolution. I did a couple interiors in Vray this summer that ended up being 12 hours, would have been 30 hours if I weren't using an extremely fast computer.

[BrianKitts]

Also, with some renderers you get a distributed bucket function - Vray and mental ray do this - that's usually more efficient but sometimes more difficult to work with.

 

also to add to andrew's comment.....look into if your renderer (what are you using BTW?) has an option similar to the vrayimage file. it writes out each section of the image to file after each bucket is done. So if you crash (or shut max without saving the image, you still have all the completed data and if it didn't finish you just start your image over (normally I reverse the rendering sequence direction) and let it pick up the rest of the unfinished render.