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This is the third attempt at a cursed render. Sometimes I just don't understand what makes the Iray renderer do what it does.

So, having done Action Leyna , I felt that really didn't do Leyna justice, and also I wanted to see how some of the facepaint stuff looked. So I thought I'd do another render while working on game stuff. Short answer: I didn't get a lot of game stuff done, not least because these renders slowed everything to a crawl.

At first I did a full-body render. Same pose as this one, same lighting (almost--I'll come to that), same set, but you saw Leyna all the way from the top of the head to the ankle straps of the shoes. This render went for 33-34 minutes just to get to fifteen percent complete, at which point I gave up and killed it. It was still extremely grainy and unfinished, and had fireflies everywhere. The resample count--a good indicator of the complexity of the render is how often it does a new Iray sample iteration and how many of them it needs--was still in very low digits, indicating each iteration was taking forever.

OK, I bethought me, the problem is probably the goddamned SdeB Short Curls Hair, my nemesis. This hair is SO INTENSIVE that it alone can double the scene load time. I cannot do a render with two human figures if one of them has this hair, it'll crash. Please note, this doesn't seem to be a memory problem. When I autofit the hair to this form (it's G8F hair), and the system took so long to do the math that I thought Studio had locked up, I checked and I was at 12% CPU use and 37% physical memory use. There seem to be certain kinds of complexity that my system just doesn't handle well, and I don't know why, even after months of dealing with it.

A real shame for this render, since there were only six hair sets I felt were suitable here and three of them wouldn't allow you to see the ear cuffs and one of them was already used in Action Leyna. That left one option, so I switched to the Morley hair, which is not only less intensive, but is G8M and thus would not need fit adjustment. And that render--nothing changed at all except the hair, and yes, I did save/New/reload because that's the only way you can reliably make Studio dispose of deleted resources--did EXACTLY THE SAME THING. By 33-34 minutes, when I stopped it, the render was only about 15% complete and still a grainy mess.

I even went into the log file. The first render had managed 232 resamples/iterations, the second 234. To give you a comparison, most of my renders would have gone through ten times that number of iterations by the time a half hour had elapsed.

OK, I said. Maybe it's all those damned LIE alterations to the face. (There are four successive LIE changes here--lips, eyeliner, eye shadow, and the face filigree.) In that case, it's just gonna take forever no matter what I do, so I'm going to zoom in a bit for more face detail, pose the face a little more carefully, and delete the three chandeliers in the set (the set had already been stripped down to only what you see in the camera before any of the renders, but I'd left in the chandeliers for extra room light) that were giving too much light in the wrong places anyway.

Again: Nothing else changed. I moved the camera in, changed the eye and lip pose a tiny bit, and deleted three emissive light sources from the scene. (Most of the light is coming from a spotlight. I left one small emissive lamp. Dome light--important, because the set is missing two of its walls so it's not light-tight--is off;the render is Scene Only.) Save, New to dispose of the deletions, reload.

The render hit 15% complete (remember, in the other two, that took a half hour) in four minutes. By the time I cut it off at an hour, it had clearly long passed the "I've done all the heavy lifting, I'm just diddling now" point. It is an extremely odd and unexpected reaction to zoom for increased facial and skin detail and have the render run FASTER. As I say: Sometimes I just don't understand. If deleting the chandeliers made the difference, I cannot for the life of me imagine why. (EDIT: Nonetheless, that seems to have been it. See the comments.)

Oh, by the by, I did want to add one thing about Leyna: Leyna comes with two body shapes, normal and "No Augmentation." That means one has breasts and one doesn't. You should be able to deduce which shape I went with in this render. I mention it because I think it's nice that the choice is offered.

Description

This is the third attempt at a cursed render. Sometimes I just don't understand what makes the Iray renderer do what it does.

So, having done Action Leyna , I felt that really didn't do Leyna justice, and also I wanted to see how some of the facepaint stuff looked. So I thought I'd do another render while working on game stuff. Short answer: I didn't get a lot of game stuff done, not least because these renders slowed everything to a crawl.

At first I did a full-body render. Same pose as this one, same lighting (almost--I'll come to that), same set, but you saw Leyna all the way from the top of the head to the ankle straps of the shoes. This render went for 33-34 minutes just to get to fifteen percent complete, at which point I gave up and killed it. It was still extremely grainy and unfinished, and had fireflies everywhere. The resample count--a good indicator of the complexity of the render is how often it does a new Iray sample iteration and how many of them it needs--was still in very low digits, indicating each iteration was taking forever.

OK, I bethought me, the problem is probably the goddamned SdeB Short Curls Hair, my nemesis. This hair is SO INTENSIVE that it alone can double the scene load time. I cannot do a render with two human figures if one of them has this hair, it'll crash. Please note, this doesn't seem to be a memory problem. When I autofit the hair to this form (it's G8F hair), and the system took so long to do the math that I thought Studio had locked up, I checked and I was at 12% CPU use and 37% physical memory use. There seem to be certain kinds of complexity that my system just doesn't handle well, and I don't know why, even after months of dealing with it.

A real shame for this render, since there were only six hair sets I felt were suitable here and three of them wouldn't allow you to see the ear cuffs and one of them was already used in Action Leyna. That left one option, so I switched to the Morley hair, which is not only less intensive, but is G8M and thus would not need fit adjustment. And that render--nothing changed at all except the hair, and yes, I did save/New/reload because that's the only way you can reliably make Studio dispose of deleted resources--did EXACTLY THE SAME THING. By 33-34 minutes, when I stopped it, the render was only about 15% complete and still a grainy mess.

I even went into the log file. The first render had managed 232 resamples/iterations, the second 234. To give you a comparison, most of my renders would have gone through ten times that number of iterations by the time a half hour had elapsed.

OK, I said. Maybe it's all those damned LIE alterations to the face. (There are four successive LIE changes here--lips, eyeliner, eye shadow, and the face filigree.) In that case, it's just gonna take forever no matter what I do, so I'm going to zoom in a bit for more face detail, pose the face a little more carefully, and delete the three chandeliers in the set (the set had already been stripped down to only what you see in the camera before any of the renders, but I'd left in the chandeliers for extra room light) that were giving too much light in the wrong places anyway.

Again: Nothing else changed. I moved the camera in, changed the eye and lip pose a tiny bit, and deleted three emissive light sources from the scene. (Most of the light is coming from a spotlight. I left one small emissive lamp. Dome light--important, because the set is missing two of its walls so it's not light-tight--is off;the render is Scene Only.) Save, New to dispose of the deletions, reload.

The render hit 15% complete (remember, in the other two, that took a half hour) in four minutes. By the time I cut it off at an hour, it had clearly long passed the "I've done all the heavy lifting, I'm just diddling now" point. It is an extremely odd and unexpected reaction to zoom for increased facial and skin detail and have the render run FASTER. As I say: Sometimes I just don't understand. If deleting the chandeliers made the difference, I cannot for the life of me imagine why. (EDIT: Nonetheless, that seems to have been it. See the comments.)

Oh, by the by, I did want to add one thing about Leyna: Leyna comes with two body shapes, normal and "No Augmentation." That means one has breasts and one doesn't. You should be able to deduce which shape I went with in this render. I mention it because I think it's nice that the choice is offered.