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ajjackson / ascii-phonons

Blender extensions for illustrations of phonons
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Backgrounding of render process from GUI #14

Closed ajjackson closed 7 years ago

ajjackson commented 8 years ago

At the moment the GUI becomes non-responsive while rendering occurs. As it is possible to request an infeasibly complicated model, it would be nice if it could be cancelled from the GUI.

Requested by @aronwalsh

ajjackson commented 7 years ago

I have now made multiple attempts at this by using multiprocessing to call Blender in a subprocess. However, Blender seems to be very reluctant to trigger the callback needed to update the GUI. Various combinations of command line arguments do or don't trigger the callback -- usually don't! I don't find this problem with other batch programs, so the problem seems to lie in a combination of Blender's odd backgrounding system, and multiprocessing's fragility and lack of information regarding terminated processes. Frustrating.

ajjackson commented 7 years ago

Closing this issue for now as I don't intend to spend more time on this approach to the problem; effort is better spent on optimising performance at this stage. Open to any new suggestions, though!