Case Log #27 Ch6

Alright! Didn't get a great number of renders done this week. Mainly because the interior environment is pretty high res. I tried different things to speed up the renders, but they were all taking 30+ minutes (to be honest, I stopped looking at the duration pretty quickly). I tried rendering just one character, and then spot rendering the second and sometimes third character, but that didn't improve the render time markedly. I'm not a fan of rendering the characters away from the background, because I don't feel like you get particularly clean edges. I cursed for a bit, had a beer (which really inspired me) and purchased Scene Optimizer. It does a few things very fast, one of which is shrinking the resolution of any asset in the scene. It's quite possible to do this manually, but it becomes a bit of a timesink, which is what I wanted to avoid in the first place. So despite my rebate mantra when it comes to Daz, I paid the full price. Is $25 going to sink the ship? Of course not. But it has a bit of a cumulative effect when you add all the purchases up...hence the reluctance. No buyers remorse on this one though as it would have taken another 6 months to finish this chapter at the snail pace I was rendering, especially since there will be overlapping characters at the dinner table and puzzling them together one by one in photoshop would have been nuts. There will still be some spot renders, but significantly faster. I think I will have about 3 render days this week and hope to surprise everyone with a decent render count next Sunday.

That's pretty much it for this week. I got angry, got drunk and fixed the problem. Probably how Einstein did it.

Cheers!