I apologize in advance for the long, complicated post. 
I've been developing a product for Daz Studio which includes several glass block props.
To give the customer the best impression of how the glass block looks when rendered, I wanted to do an animation. Unfortunately (for me), doing a render of even a single 360 x 270 frame takes f-o-r-e-v-e-r on my old Dell 4400 laptop running Windows XP 64-bit (complicated by 2 ray-traced lights, a render settings using a max ray trace depth of 3 and a shading rate of 0.75). There are 1330 frames in the animation, so that means tying up my computer for days on end (possibly a week) to complete the render of the animation. While rendering I can't use my computer for anything else because DS uses 99% of the CPU while rendering, which means - click something and take a nap until the CPU recognizes that you did something.
So, I decided to do my rendering on a different machine. My brother gave me his old Dell XP running Windows 7 64-bit. It's a much faster machine, especially since it's has a faster CPU and it's quad-core (my Dell 4400 is dual-core), but even so I calculated that it would take 4.25 days to to render the entire animation.
I got the render started - and it seems to be right on schedule as it, at the moment, is busy rendering the 871 st frame after running for 2 days and 22 hours.
Still, 4 days to render a single animation is a lot of time, especially if you realize something is wrong and you have to make some changes requiring the render to be started all over again. This has happened once already and I know I'll need to make at least one more change and start the render process over again, but I decided to let the current render run just so I can make sure if there may be any other changes needed which I may not realize until I see the completed animation.
So, I decided to set up another computer to render on. I could set it to do the render from frame 1500 and then edit the separate renders from the two computers together in a video app.
Seemed like a good idea at the time, but I have run into many issues in setting up my even-older Dell 9100 desktop computer, running Windows XP 32-bit. I won't go into any of the problems except the last one - the bizarre one.
I have DS 4.9 running all three computers, but since the Dell 4400 and the Dell XP are 64-bit and the Dell 9100 is 32-bit, I have DS 4.9 Win64 running on the first two computers and DS 4.9 Win32 on the third one.
I thought all I'd have to do would be to copy the duf file I was rendering already on the Dell XP to to the Dell 9100 and away we go.
Nope.
It's never easy, is it?
The DS 4.9 Win32 wouldn't read the duf file - it would crash every time.
I even tried going back to the original animation which was saved using DS 3.1 Win64 on my Dell 4400, but it still crashed.
Nope again. It crashed too.
I suspected that it might have to do with the 32 and 64 bit difference.
I'll spare you the details (if it isn't already too late), but I wound up reconstructing the animation by reading the old DS 3.1 ds file into DS 4.0 Win32 (installed on the Dell 9100), saved it, read that file into DS 4.9 Win32 (Dell 9100), deleted everything except for V4 and the Mill Cat, which were the only two things animated, loaded the latest version of the glass block bathroom scene, and saved it.
I restarted the Dell 9100, because it seemed to be running even slower than usual, restarted DS 4.9 Win32, and read in the file I had just saved a few minutes before.
Now comes the bizarre part. (If it isn't already too late for that, too.)
Everything loaded in okay, except that the background cylinder I was using had one of the mill cat textures applied to it! Huh? So I shut DS down, restarted it, and read the file in again.
Now, there was a cat texture applied to all of the glass blocks! Huh, again? So I repeated the restart and tried a third time.
Now the cat texture was on V4! Triple-huh?
I check various things out and discovered that, even though V4 appeared in the view pane with the cat texture, if I ran a spot render it rendered with the V4 texture. So I looked at the Materials pane and saw that even though the diffuse texture was set to the proper V4 texture, if you hovered the cursor over it so that the preview of the texture came up, it had an odd image of the texture - not either V4 or the cat. (BTW - the cat is in the scene - it's just behind the little half-wall of the shower at the zero frame of the animation.)
Here's a screenshot of what I saw (DS 4.9 WIn32):
Click to enlarge
So I tried to do a single render, hoping it would turn out with the V4 texture, just like the spot render did.
Nope. Well, yes, actually. Sorta. It did use the V4 texture, but the glass block was very strange looking.
How it should look (rendered on the Dell XP in DS 4.9 Win64):
How it turned out rendered on the Dell 9100 using DS 4.9 Win32:
So my "good idea" to save time rendering wound up taking me almost 3 days - and I STILL can't use the second computer to render (Dell 9100)!
I just may have to switch to rendering on the Dell 4400 (using DS 4.9 WIn64 and use the Dell 9100 for my product production work.
*sigh*
Like I said - it's never easy.
I've been developing a product for Daz Studio which includes several glass block props.
To give the customer the best impression of how the glass block looks when rendered, I wanted to do an animation. Unfortunately (for me), doing a render of even a single 360 x 270 frame takes f-o-r-e-v-e-r on my old Dell 4400 laptop running Windows XP 64-bit (complicated by 2 ray-traced lights, a render settings using a max ray trace depth of 3 and a shading rate of 0.75). There are 1330 frames in the animation, so that means tying up my computer for days on end (possibly a week) to complete the render of the animation. While rendering I can't use my computer for anything else because DS uses 99% of the CPU while rendering, which means - click something and take a nap until the CPU recognizes that you did something.
So, I decided to do my rendering on a different machine. My brother gave me his old Dell XP running Windows 7 64-bit. It's a much faster machine, especially since it's has a faster CPU and it's quad-core (my Dell 4400 is dual-core), but even so I calculated that it would take 4.25 days to to render the entire animation.
I got the render started - and it seems to be right on schedule as it, at the moment, is busy rendering the 871 st frame after running for 2 days and 22 hours.
Still, 4 days to render a single animation is a lot of time, especially if you realize something is wrong and you have to make some changes requiring the render to be started all over again. This has happened once already and I know I'll need to make at least one more change and start the render process over again, but I decided to let the current render run just so I can make sure if there may be any other changes needed which I may not realize until I see the completed animation.
So, I decided to set up another computer to render on. I could set it to do the render from frame 1500 and then edit the separate renders from the two computers together in a video app.
Seemed like a good idea at the time, but I have run into many issues in setting up my even-older Dell 9100 desktop computer, running Windows XP 32-bit. I won't go into any of the problems except the last one - the bizarre one.
I have DS 4.9 running all three computers, but since the Dell 4400 and the Dell XP are 64-bit and the Dell 9100 is 32-bit, I have DS 4.9 Win64 running on the first two computers and DS 4.9 Win32 on the third one.
I thought all I'd have to do would be to copy the duf file I was rendering already on the Dell XP to to the Dell 9100 and away we go.
Nope.
It's never easy, is it?
The DS 4.9 Win32 wouldn't read the duf file - it would crash every time.
I even tried going back to the original animation which was saved using DS 3.1 Win64 on my Dell 4400, but it still crashed.
Nope again. It crashed too.
I suspected that it might have to do with the 32 and 64 bit difference.
I'll spare you the details (if it isn't already too late
), but I wound up reconstructing the animation by reading the old DS 3.1 ds file into DS 4.0 Win32 (installed on the Dell 9100), saved it, read that file into DS 4.9 Win32 (Dell 9100), deleted everything except for V4 and the Mill Cat, which were the only two things animated, loaded the latest version of the glass block bathroom scene, and saved it.I restarted the Dell 9100, because it seemed to be running even slower than usual, restarted DS 4.9 Win32, and read in the file I had just saved a few minutes before.
Now comes the bizarre part. (If it isn't already too late for that, too.
)Everything loaded in okay, except that the background cylinder I was using had one of the mill cat textures applied to it! Huh? So I shut DS down, restarted it, and read the file in again.
Now, there was a cat texture applied to all of the glass blocks! Huh, again? So I repeated the restart and tried a third time.
Now the cat texture was on V4! Triple-huh?
I check various things out and discovered that, even though V4 appeared in the view pane with the cat texture, if I ran a spot render it rendered with the V4 texture. So I looked at the Materials pane and saw that even though the diffuse texture was set to the proper V4 texture, if you hovered the cursor over it so that the preview of the texture came up, it had an odd image of the texture - not either V4 or the cat. (BTW - the cat is in the scene - it's just behind the little half-wall of the shower at the zero frame of the animation.)
Here's a screenshot of what I saw (DS 4.9 WIn32):
Click to enlarge
So I tried to do a single render, hoping it would turn out with the V4 texture, just like the spot render did.
Nope. Well, yes, actually. Sorta. It did use the V4 texture, but the glass block was very strange looking.
How it should look (rendered on the Dell XP in DS 4.9 Win64):
How it turned out rendered on the Dell 9100 using DS 4.9 Win32:
So my "good idea" to save time rendering wound up taking me almost 3 days - and I STILL can't use the second computer to render (Dell 9100)!
I just may have to switch to rendering on the Dell 4400 (using DS 4.9 WIn64 and use the Dell 9100 for my product production work.
*sigh*
Like I said - it's never easy.
