Partial rendering a scene / "Spot rendering" to File
Is it possible to only render part of a scene?
I don't mean using the spot render camera tool to see something on the screen how it'll look.
I mean, just like ...selecting a section of the scene, and rendering it out to a file with the full settings and resolution hitting "cmd -R" would give you? Not moving the camera to only focus on the object...same camera distance etc...
using built in renderer....
The situation:
I'm doing a three picture sequence. I've decided while doing the third picture, I wanted to change the label on a wine bottle in the scene.
Rather than having to do an entire re-render, I would like to just be able to render an area surrounding the bottle, then composite the two images in photoshop.
(I can do similar if I screen shot from the rendering image, and pasting that into Photoshop works really well, but only time saved because in that situation, the new changes were in the center of the scene so spiral rendering had them appear first. The wine bottles in the current situation are not that easily placed.).


Comments
Not directly to a file, but if you switch to the Spot Render tool and go to Tool Settings you cans et it to render to a new window which will give you a full render of the selected area, which you can save and layer over the original image.
That looks like EXACTLY what I need! Thanks Richard!
Bump for love... Stumbled across this tip while looking for something-else...
This is going to save me HOURS of rendering time, where I just change small things in a scene, and normally ended-up rendering-out the whole scene again.
Of Richard's 31,647 posts... about 99.9% of them are all fruitful to production or resolutions. Man, if I had a million dollars... I'd give you like... hal... um... quar... um... well... I'd give you some undefined amount... :P
Every little helps.
I've found a great way to render in huge resolution (10K - 15K px close-ups) very fast by rendering partially without crashing DAZ studio
- Create New Primitive - Plane, hide parts of the image you don't want to render under these planes leaving only the part you want to render visible, and that's it !
Hope this helps some-one else as well ;D
Almost everyone is interested in speed, but what exactly is a "10K - 15K px close-up"?
Also my understanding is that Iray acts on ALL geometry in the scene, so blocking things with a plane won't really help.
A close-up image of something that is 10,000 to 15,000 pixels across I guess.
Old thread, but it's close to my issue: I have rendered approx 240 frames of a movie-to-be but have just discovered a small, but obvious, element of the scene has somehow got lost. Each frame takes 5 to 9 minutes to render - but most of that is the bits that are not what has gone missing.
Is there any way to do the same as the "spot render to new window" but do it for the whole 240 frames? As you might have guessed, there are animated elements interacting with my missing bits?
Failing that, I'm going to try the suggestion above from albaricoquero-etc. although I'm not sure I fully understand it.
BTW - I'm using 3Delight as the render engine.
Cheers, Lx
There is a tool for that.
https://www.daz3d.com/smart-spot-render
Woo Hoo, omvendt - exactly what I needed.
I did try (use actually) what I understood of albaricoquero-etc.'s technique. What I did wasn't quite the solution, but post processing of it gave a good solution:
1. Create black hide-it planes to hide everything except the area neededing re-rendering - and render - result is a series of frames with the required area re-rendered and all else black.
2. [I got ChatGPT to write me a python-script-turned-into-windows-.exe] Process the frame sequence to turn black transparent. This was a little tricky as part of the re-rendered area were fire flames that were part transparent themselves and too-simple a black-to-transparent conversion left them with blackened edges quite unlike the proper render. This was solved by pushing the black-to-transparency a suitable distance into grey and the potential for some feathering of the boundary.
3.[I got ChatGPT to write me another ...-to-.exe] Merge the rerendered .png sequence onto the original .jpg sequence.
The result was very acceptable, and (with the assistance of ChatGPT) saved me hours.
A quick note on ChatGPT. I've done a moderate amount of very varied nature with both it and (less) Claude AI. In general I have been enormously underwhelmed. But for this interaction it was almost impressive. We had several shots because there were processing environment things I had to set up (python and pillow) but ChatCPT was quite good helping me navigate these. And, as so often, ChatGPT failed to follow instructions first time around for the black conversion, producing an elegant script that did not do the job. Second time around (same specification from me) it got the script right. LESSON: brutally check that what ChatGPT produces is the result you wanted, not some crappy shortcut it dreamed up that doesn't actually meet your spec.
I have found Le Chat by Mistral AI to be really good, sometimes even really impressive