[workflow question] Keeping a Mac from going into 'sleep mode'

arcady

This is something of a workflow question.

I lost a 2 hour render last night because I left my Mac to render it, and the darn hard-drive went into sleep mode halfway through.

My app of choice was Carrara and when it woke up, there were sections of the render the app had lost its train of though over or something... it knew the render was not done, but it never went back to those spots.

I've gone into system preferences and turned off the screen saver, and set the energy saving options to 'never' on sleep... but it appears there must be a third place somewhere that I've missed...

This has to be something other Mac users rendering complex scenes, regardless of application, have dealt with? :)

Totte

arcady said:

This is something of a workflow question.

I lost a 2 hour render last night because I left my Mac to render it, and the darn hard-drive went into sleep mode halfway through.

My app of choice was Carrara and when it woke up, there were sections of the render the app had lost its train of though over or something... it knew the render was not done, but it never went back to those spots.

I've gone into system preferences and turned off the screen saver, and set the energy saving options to 'never' on sleep... but it appears there must be a third place somewhere that I've missed...

This has to be something other Mac users rendering complex scenes, regardless of application, have dealt with? :)

Never shut down hard drives is my bet.

Three Wishes

Jump up to the App Store and grab Caffeine. It's free.

It'll install on your upper right menu bar as a simple toggle, shaped like a cup of coffee. Flick it on, your Mac stays awake.

What's really cool is that it's independent of screen sleep, so if (like me) you sleep close to your workstation, you can still set up a screen hot corner to shut your displays down, and Caffeine will keep your system chugging away merrily on your render all night long.

Tramp Graphics

Go into your system preferences and click on "Energy Saver". There should be two slider bars there, one for "Computer Sleep", and one for "Display Sleep". Slide the "Computer Sleep" slider all the way to the right to "Never". That will prevent your computer from going to sleep and thus not interrupt anymore renders. Those are the only two settings for computer energy saving. If that's already been done, then there is something wrong. There is no other "third" setting. I have never had a problem with my Mac going to sleep and ruining a render.