Bound By Night

BtS: Technical Rant on RenderQueue

Added 2023-01-25 03:59:46 +0000 UTC

Behind

It's been a while since I talked about what goes into making the images for BBN and a lot of new patrons since then. This won't be a full description of that process, but today has been largely spent (read: wasted) tilting at windmills trying to resolve a rather pernicious issue.

As background, I create the renders using a bit of software called Daz Studio. This is basically a 3d studio in which I load up different environments, customize them, add our characters, lighting, set some camera angles, and then images pop out on the other side. (Okay, it's a bit more complicated than that, but close enough.)

Now, an individual render (or image) can take about 15 minutes to run, even with the new graphics card, so I use a special application that lets me just queue them up and then run the images overnight. This lets me work much more efficiently, provided there are no huge problems with the images.

Well, this morning I woke up to look at the renders I'd run the previous night, and I wound up with a lot of this:

You can see Alex's ear is clipping the pillow. Alright. I have a solution for that. I make some adjustments, test it, run a manual render, it looks great. Like this:

So, I make the same adjustment to the next dozen images, queue them up for rendering, and they all start to come back with the damn clipping again. I load up one of the scenes that clipped again, run it manually... and it comes back nice and clean, just like it's supposed to.

For some reason, the utility I use to run the images in batches (generally overnight) isn't letting the pillow morph to Alex's head the way it does when I render it manually. So... I have to run all these renders manually. Sigh.

Anyway, still aiming to get this out to everyone before the end of the month. Bear with me, please.