Would like an Overwrite and Placeholder Feature for Image Sequence Renders

MarkusB

I'm not sure if this has been suggested before. My quick search of this Forums has not indicated it has but if it has, my apologies for duplicating.  My desire is as follows:

Blender has two settings for image series renders - Overwrite (looks to see if a file name is already present and if so does not overwrite it) and Placeholder (before a frame is rendered, it puts a placeholder file in the render folder). The combination of these two settings allows a User with 2 or more computers to render the same animation scene across multiple computers without having to block out a specific range of frames for Computer A, Computer B etc. Different computers have different render "strengths".  Computer A may finish frames 1-10 before Computer B finishes frames 11-20 leaving Computer A sitting unutilized while Computer B finishes. The advantage to this feature is reduced render time for the poject.  The first computer to finish rendering a frame looks to see if the next frame has already been rendered (i.e., is a placeholder present for the frame). If a placeholder is present, it moves to the next available frame to render and so on.

It would be great to have this logic built into Daz Studio for both 3DL and Iray. I realize there are some plugins out there for Render Farms (although the ones I've seen are Windows only - I use both Mac and PC but my power machine is a Mac Pro) and there are Render Farm services as well and using external render engines are also an option. But I'm suggesting adding this logic for another alternative to these other workflows. It isn't quite a full on built-in render farm but enough feature to essentially result in one if used as described.