I'm rendering an animation of a somewhat complex landscape based on isosurfaces,
and rendertimes vary between 30 minutes and infinite.

I have taken the usual precautions to limit number of reflections, max_gradient
and so forth, but still a few individual frames appear to never finish, the
parallel povray processes chewing away at the last few tens of pixels.

My problem is now that I do not want to change the scene files since most of the
animation is already done and only 5 frames missing. An easy mitigation would be
to render those 5 as far as one can get, and use gimp or whatever to replace the
missing few pixels from the frames before and after - much like in standard
movie restoration.

The problem is - povray wouldn't let me have those. All it produces is a
pov-state file, and whenever I initiate any kind of abort, no image can be found
on disk (3.7, the version).


So my question is: Is there a way to abort the render such that I have the
partially (almost fully, in fact) rendered image on disk?
What would be even better still - is there a possibility to set a hard limit to
the render time of individual frames in an animation, after which povray would
give up on that frame, put the image to disk as it is, and continue with the
next one?  That would be really useful...

  m.

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