progressive rendering - animation

is it posible to somehow enable “progressive rendering” when you’re rendering an animation?

lets say like this, i set it to progressive render, and a sample value of 5. then i set the format to PNG, and select a folder for the rendered images. then i click animate, and leave.

when i come back, the resoult will be a total of 250 images in the folder (or however many frames you render), and the quality of the images will depend on the time spendt rendering…

kinda how you can progressivly render an image, and cancle it when you get back for best posible quality.

and the quality of the images will depend on the time spendt rendering.

Doesn’t that assume that you’re expecting each frame of an animation to be the same quality after rendering for the same amount of time.

I guess your animation does not rely on anything moving in or out of shot or anything affecting the lighting or reflections on any objects etc

You would need something to say the render has achieved your desired ‘quality’ before going onto the next frame rather than rendering for a set time period.

no, just like a normal animation. such that it renders the whole animation with 5 samples several times and combinds the images when you cancle the rendering.

There isn’t a simple way to set that up currently. Having to do all those extra frame switches/reloads is going to add a good chunk of overhead to the render, so usually people don’t bother. Also, Cycles’ sampler doesn’t have any way to recover it’s position in the sequence, so you’d have to start over with a new seed each time. Thats resets the stratification of samples, leaving you with more noise than is normal for that # of samples.