I recently wound up in the situation of having built out a fairly complex project for continuous playback and later wound up needing to render it out to an EXR sequence. Due to my display shutting off and the renderer seizing up, I wound up needing to re-render and, since my project was configured for ‘Running/Loopable’ in a whole bunch of nodes throughout my project, I couldn’t just restart my render from where I’d left off.
Had I been more organized I probably could’ve sidestepped this issue but, it did make me think that it might be cool to have a utility panel that monitors/toggles the parameters on a layer that allow it to run in a deterministic fashion.
We’re taking a close look at determinism and data caching for the next release, so it will be much more reliable workflow.
Running/loopable isn’t necessarily linked to determinism, that just dictates whether the effect loops at the end of a layer or resets (although a global control is being looked at).
Determinism is about whether content under identical circumstances produces identical results. A lot of particle affectors and other nodes have needed to be refactored to properly support this, but even still a dropped frame can cause de-sync. For rendering to video, we think caching systems before export will make the most sense.