Summer's Gone - Season 2 - Chapter 1 - Dev Log #24

Hello,

The log after this one will be on Wednesday the 12th. I want to return to the Wednesday Dev logs.

I took the liberty of postponing this log until I had some numbers from the new Workstation... And boy do I have them now.

With the arrival of the new Workstation, my old 2021 Workstation will become a slave PC.

The entire process of moving the library and everything else over took around 60 hours.

Workstation comparisons and data.

I did the following tests:

• Load & render a scene with 2 people in it.

• Load & render a scene with 20 people in it. (Book club from Chapter 5)

• Render a test animation.

• Load a character into the scene.

• Scene saving

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2 People scene. (Opening and rendering)

Old: 13:20min

New: 8:25

Improvement: ~5min

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20 People scene.  (Opening and rendering)

Old: 46:08min

New: 29:20min

Improvement: ~17min

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Test animation - 70 Iterations - 120 frames 

Old: 1:45h

New: 1:13h

Improvement: ~32min

A final animation would run at 1500 iterations and there it would save even more time because of the additional A6000. (I would assume it would run 2-3h faster. I'll test it overnight.)

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Okay, okay... You save 5min here and 17min there... Let me put this into perspective.

If I have an update that is ~7000 renders big, and I save an average of 11min per render, we're looking at 53+ days saved.

That's almost 2 months saved of just Daz opening and rendering scenes.

The bigger the scene, the more time I save... In the grand scheme of an entire update, we're talking about months.

After Chapter 1, I'll return to my normal update size of ~3000-3500 renders. With an average of 11 minutes saved, we save almost an entire month.

This is without adding the 2nd Workstation to it, which currently runs on a 4090. It will render animations until there are none left to render, at which point it moves over to the stills.

I haven't had the chance to test the new PC in the queue yet, but if it can render more than 55-70 renders a night, it will constantly outperform me.

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Other improvements that will add up:

• Scenes like the book club save 5-10x as fast. It sometimes takes almost a minute to save a scene, which disrupts the flow. Now, it saves giant scenes in less than 10 seconds.

• Loading characters into the scene. On the old Workstation, it took 2:30 minutes to load Bellchen into a scene, whereas it took 1:01 minutes on the new workstation. This is a big one, as I often have to load assets and characters into the scene. I can only assume that poses will also load faster.

• And my favorite: the viewport performance. On the old Workstation, it feels like you have 3 fps in the book club scene. It feels like going through mud up to your thighs with a screen freeze every 10-15 seconds.

  On the new PC, it feels like there are maybe four people in the scene. Scenes with just two characters feel empty.

  This is so important because it directly impacts your mental. If a scene lags and the screen freezes every X seconds it will annoy the shit out of you.

• The airflow of the case is amazing. It keeps the 3x A6000 ADAs at ~60-65°C without me removing the side panel. (Which I had to do for all other PCs.)

• Photoshop feels much smoother. A big hassle during postwork is that after a while the performance drops hard.

On paper this Workstation is worth every penny, however, let's see how it will perform over a long period of time.

From now on, I will count every render I make and give you the number in every dev log. So in 11 days, you'll hear about what I rendered, not just setup, but actually rendered out.

We're starting at 0.

If we ignore the past 3 days in which I spent setting everything up, work has been continued as usual.

I do my scenes, the queue does queue-things and that's all there is.

Actually, the phone chat is done and I'm preparing SFX files for the update.

Previews:

I just picked two random renders for previews today, as I just wanted to test if my Adobe workflow works on the new PC.

The Mila render looks like a wallpaper but is actually an ingame render on a specific route with a slightly different art style.

With the next Dev Log I'll make true of what I said a few dev logs ago, there will only be one preview from now on.

Apparently, I'm one of the only devs who shows multiple previews every single Dev Log and while I like doing it, it shows too much.

I want to keep more scenes a secret and sometimes, I'll add a nude preview for the Summer tier and above.

I'll end this Dev log here because I'm so excited to work. I want to see and feel what it's like to work with this beast.

I mentioned the Specs of the workstation in the last Log I think... I added my previously acquired two A6000 ADAs to the one that came with the workstation.

I also got enterprise SSDs with 7.68TB and one of them is in RAID 1 to minimize the risk of data loss.

I'll see you in 11 days with some numbers.

• Ocean