Totally happened. I learned about Windows Setting Affinity (in the task manager>Processes>Right Click where I can determine which threads any software uses, so I set MR batch render to use 6 threads, set maya's affinity to the first six threads of my i7, and set the last two to Steam. Set Affinity will apply to any apps opened/called by the master app, so Mass Effect was auto-set to the last two cores and MayaBatch.exe was set to the first six, since it was called by Maya.

It felt kind of amazing

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Peter Srinivasan
Producer

Sure, you can do it, but it's not particularly efficient. Remember, when you do this, you're essentially removing one-nth of your processing power for both tasks.

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Imagination is more important than knowledge.

I considered that. The key here is that I was losing a lot of time by hitting render and not returning immediately once the render was complete. And due to the nature of the directors process, I can't just batch render everything in one fell swoop, I have to animate a shot, render, animate render. I also did some (non-scientific) benchmarking and it turns out that removing 2 / 8 cores on my machine had a smaller effect than the expected. 8 Cores rendered at around 48s / frame. You would expect 6 to render at 64s / frame but in practice it rendered at around 56s/ frame. Render times looked like I only lost 1 core, surprisingly.

But yeah, the biggest thing was that I would spend hours away from the system doing nothing of note and come back and it would be done rendering, and I would have missed some large amount of time where the prompt just read "Render Complete." Now, with dual screen, the moment it finishes I can save and jump in. The MOST efficient thing given the directoral constraints would be to render each shot and sit with the computer doing nothing, but given the very low pay...

Sega can wait 1/(n*2) - [time that would have been spent AFK]

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Peter Srinivasan
Producer

The other key is that I learned something I didn't know about my operating system that will come in handy in other ways too.

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Peter Srinivasan
Producer

sounds like you could use the command line to render. That way you can render everything in given maya files with given cameras and frames and as a bonus you don't need maya open.

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that's a "Ch" pronounced as a "K"

Computer skills I should have:
Objective C, C#, Java, MEL. Python, C++, XML, JavaScript, XSLT, HTML, SQL, CSS, FXScript, Clips, SOAR, ActionScript, OpenGL, DirectX
Maya, XSI, Photoshop, AfterEffects, Motion, Illustrator, Flash, Swift3D

I'm gonna be doing that for Episode 2. Now that mr director man finally feels like he can trust my shots. That's why I had to render them one at a time :O

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Peter Srinivasan
Producer

ah I see! That's always good when a boss person trusts your work!

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that's a "Ch" pronounced as a "K"

Computer skills I should have:
Objective C, C#, Java, MEL. Python, C++, XML, JavaScript, XSLT, HTML, SQL, CSS, FXScript, Clips, SOAR, ActionScript, OpenGL, DirectX
Maya, XSI, Photoshop, AfterEffects, Motion, Illustrator, Flash, Swift3D