Day 65

I set up my dust to render.My files on the farm also started moving. But they are crawling. There was a class scheduled today at 12pm to 1.30pm. So I didn't really start doing much work before I had to evacuate my work station to make way for the class. The class today was an introductory class to Houdini.

After the class, I then continued with my work. I took a frame of my dust and did a quick composition with the terrain and realised that there wasn't enough dust. I then started tweaking the dust.

Mr Steven dropped by in the evening to check on our progress. I showed him my terrain render and the dust, and also the quick composition. I told him that my files are taking very long to render. I was wondering if he could take a look at it and if possible help me optimise.

He took a look and first thing he told me was to turn off geometry velocity blur on my terrain. Then he reset my min/max ray samples to default and turn up my pixel samples to 5. He also told me not to use environment light as it will increase my render time by a decent amount. He also tried rendering out shadow maps. He also replaced my arealight to a spotlight with deep shadows.

He then asked me to send a frame of my cache file and my hip file to him so that he could take a even closer look. He also told me that I must cache the simulation files with a shader assigned out. He told me that I should find a way to fake the environment lighting without using the actual environment light.

I left the files to cache overnight.