A little talk about the technical stuff

This picture took me 15 minutes to render. Pretty good, huh? But can you guess how long does it take to make the same picture, but with a building in the background? Trick question. The answer is forever.

Hello. Instead of our usual Saturday story talks, this time I want to discuss the technical stuff. I don't want to rant or whine, so I'll just clear up some of my objective limitations. This isn't exactly an interesting subject, so don't worry about skipping it. I'll save the cool stuff for tomorrow's progress report :)

So. About that building in the background. See, Daz3d, in which I make my pictures, is an extremely fickle, and unpredictable thing. I had to learn my technical boundaries the hard way. Basically my scenes can't have more than 20 meters of distance, and more than three characters (in some cases not even three). Trying to add more will just crash the program for no apparent reason. The log files don't say anything, it's just «GPU crashed, CPU crashed, failed to allocate memory» etc. Who knows what's the reason. All I know is that my new CPU didn't solve any of these problems. This is one of the reasons why I don't put threesomes on the polls, even though I'd love to. I just don't know which combinations are possible (keep in mind that the environment is even more important than the characters themselves) to render at all.

Basically, I have to cheat a lot. Sometimes I use the texture shrinker (it makes things look like garbage, but in some cases it's the only way), sometimes I just «cut» scenes in parts, and render them separately (remember that scene from v0.1 where Blake watches Mack, and Candy? Initially I wanted to fit all three of them in the same picture. It wasn't possible), sometimes I change the event entirely, and move it to a lighter location. All this crap takes way too long, and this is the main reason I can't pop out 150+ renders per demo. Eh.

Well, the important part is that I'm slowly saving for the new computer. I hope I'll be able to buy one in May, for my birthday. And until then Blake's hair will remain the same. Because the one we picked adds 700 Mbytes of geometry. And Blake's own model weighs only 30 Mbytes. So… yeah. Tough stuff, but there's no way around it. We just have to wait.