My original plan was to do something simple for New Years: pretty (okay beefy and thicc) girls in short dresses, dancing.
So... I made my first picture, Stormy and Xiu. A little fiddling to get the pose right —two girls, in heels, of vastly different heights, each carrying a little more mass than your average Hollywood starlet— I was feeling pretty good.
Then I added the background. A pretty ballroom, all in browns and tans, with glowing lights on the walls and overhead... yeah, this was gonna be awesome.
I went ahead and posed my other models, got two angles for three of them... Voila! I was ready to render.
And then, it all went to hell.
I honestly don't know what happened to DAZ, iray, and NVidia, lately, but whatever it was, it seriously borked render times. A picture that should have taken, at most, an hour now takes more to eight hours if I let it run to term.
Frustrating? You bet.
So... resolution: I will figure out where the fault lies in my rendering engine and I will set it right. Or, more likely, I will get extremely frustrated and keep on like I have been.
Sigh.