Digital Art Zone

The ‘Progressive Render’ check box, what exactly does this do???
Thus far, I’ve been rendering without it. When I did try it briefly at the beginning, the render was taking extraordinarily long, so I abandoned the process.
I did a forum search here, but can’t seem to find a conversation on the subject.
I’m assuming that it takes so much longer because it is doing more detailed rendering, is this indeed the case?
Or is it more for specific purposes like occlusion and shadows, maybe?
Would appreciate some real world application and thoughts on usage of ‘Pregressive Render’.
Thanks!

-Sol

Best advice is don’t use it.  It gobbles up masses of RAM very quickly, and has been known to crash otherwise stable systems.

It needs to be stopped long before completion or it may crash DS4.  If I need to see what a light or surface looks lie quickly, I just turn up the Shading Rate to 4 or even 8, and that gives me an idea.

Progressive render is progressive in the same way that Progressive JPG is - it starts off by doing a very widely spaced set of pixels, then goes back and does the pixels half-way between those, then goes back and fills in between those and so on. It is slow and memory-hungry, so I really wouldn’t use it for a final render - where it is useful is doing a crude render to get a feel of how the whole scene is building, and how the lights are falling, without having to wait for a full render to complete - it’s especially useful when used with the Spot Render tool.

Hey guys, thanks for the quick replies.
I actually just found a DAZ video fully explaining Progressive Rendering, by leaving the forum and doing a quick google search. And exactly as you said Richard, just like jpeg rendering for a partial preview. My previous experience was a compete bogging down of my i7 core iMac system, taking hours, until I bailed on it. So probably the RAM issue you guys mention here. I think I’ll just leave that box alone.

Thanks!