Improved Command Line Render Verbose

[richardlevene]

When rendering via command line it would be great to get increased level of verbose messages in regards to render status % complete etc. At the moment we render very high resolution frames via deadline and it is always a worry when we see a shot still rendering after 10 hours and never quite sure where it is in the render and we have to check the cpus are running etc to make sure it is actually still rendering.

[michael_nikelsky]

The 2024 version now outputs some info to the console every 2 seconds when doing an offline render. For VREDPro you need to pass the -console parameter to see it and make sure the console is wide enough since the same line is always overwritten and a line break can cause a bit of a mess.

[richardlevene]

oh ok thanks Michael. So if vred is run via Deadline we need to make sure -console is passed in the argument?

Will try and test this. We are still on 23 in production

[michael_nikelsky]

I have no idea how Deadline works but if you want to see any output to the console you will need to pass the -console argument when starting VRED. The info is currently not written to the log files at the moment since it would clutter them too much but we could probably write something there every minute or so as well (or maybe at a user defined interval?).

[Bob.Bon2000]

Hey @michael_nikelsky 2 cents from my side. I can't pass -console because that breaks vred stdout and we get NO output from it at all!!

If you start vred via QProcess and try to get stdout with -console parameter there is no output to QProcess via any of the std err/out/etc channels. No matter the mode/etc.

Please update vred to not require it or fix your console wrapper logic so that it does not break stdout. As far as I can tell you create a console & re-route msgs out to that and we can't capture that console process stdout. Or atl east I could not after trying for 9 hours. Perhaps you can provide pyside example ? 

Please just print the progress the same way you print anything in vred. 

Also please print a regexp-able message like

Rendering Started

Rendering Progress 10%

Rendering Finished

Render Output FileNames = xx, yy, zz, dd 

That would be epicio.

don't just print 10% ;x

[michael_nikelsky]

Hi @Bob.Bon2000, we actually just use std::cout to print the progress. So if you get any output to your console already you don´t need the -console parameter, you only need it when you start from a windows commandline since you don´t get any output there (at least I don´t, a bash works fine though).
I don´t really want to use our normal way of printing since that automatically writes to the log files and you can guess yourself how big that logfile would get when updating it every 2 seconds.

[richardlevene]

@michael_nikelskyI guess the point of my request in general was so that render managers are able to parse more complete output messages accordingly. I won't be doing vred renders via cmd line manually. I doubt others would be. So the results need to be open enough for these render managers or custom apps people make to be able to get a detailed set of render messages. So an open documentation example of how it is retrieved would be good.

Anyway i will test to see if there is a difference in vred 23 and 24 rendered via deadline and i will reach out to deadline to let them know what you have done with the update and if they can test.

[Bob.Bon2000]

@michael_nikelsky sounds promising thank you!

Can you expose some options for that print in settings - settable by python/ cmd line ?

It would be great to get clean render start/stop/crash/cancel/progress/output/etc logs.

I'll try 2024 see what magical output it gives us! 

Thanks!

[michael_nikelsky]

At the moment this is just a quick implementation of a progress so no settings or anything for now. The output looks like this (and because it is quite lengthy the console should be wide enough to not insert a line break in there).

Rendering in progress: Completed 26.56%, elapsed rendering time: 2.03 seconds, estimated time left for completing frame: 5.60 seconds

If tools like deadline just pass along whatever is written to the console this should already work, if they do something else they should probably reach out to us at some point as we know absolutely nothing about what they do.

[Bob.Bon2000]

@michael_nikelsky That's a great start thanks! I'll regexp all of it ^^

Thanks!