HI Markus,
This is how we learn😉
If you disable Overwrite, Blender will not Render the Image Sequence, if it's already Rendered in the Output Folder, so you won't lose anything.
You'll have to pay attention when Rendering and it's a good idea to keep an eye on the first few Frames, to see if everything goes as planned.
Blender does exactly what you tell it to do, so you'll have to be careful with what you ask.
There might be Addons that do what you want, but I don't know if and which.
Yeah stuff like this happens a lot, not only when rendering, but in like every stage of the pipeline and no matter the 3D package, it's just that these software's are so huge and have so many functionalities, it's hard to keep safeguards everywhere, so it's most of the time on us to be mindful of things. As Martin said, we learn the hard way.
Coming from a 3dsmax background, I'm used playblast (aka viewport render) having completely separate output settings for saving files, and I was surprised by this difference in workflow I guess.
Sure, every 3D software has it's own pitfalls. I guess the important thing is to learn good practices and workflows, so I'm curious how the Blender Pros are doing it? I guess one way you could set it up is duplicating your Blender scene with everyting instanced, call the new one "Playblast", and just have different outputs: exr for renders, and MP4 for playblasts?
I also saw some addons out there. There is one called DuBlast specifically for handling playblasts, but I haven't tried it. And there are addons for dealing with rendering output like this one: https://github.com/jeinselen/Blender-RenderKit
Thanks! 😊
Maybe you can take advantage of the file output node? I remember in this old tutorial, the teacher uses it to get around a similar issue if I remember correctly. You can check it out:
The problem you had, was that you Rendered the Playblast as .EXR files and those were already there, that's why they got overwritten.
If you'd have changed the Output Format to .PNG, JPEG, MP4, or so for the Playblast, you'd be fine.
"...changing Output Settings is easy to forget..."
You'll learn to remember.
The method I've seen is to change the output path. The playblast output is set in the shots blend file. Then you use background/command line rendering either manually or thru batch script to do final renders. Side note: the option is
-o or --render-output
Followed by path and file name. No space in the path or file name. Use. Double forward slash(//) at the beginning to denote relative to blend file. Additional note: Blender options are case sensitive. So O is different than o.