The Far Reaches Webcomic

I’m having some delays due to the big 3d background for the next page. I set it all up in Vue 5, which I had used for the previous cityscape scenes and tried to render. It wanted to take 37 hours. I thought that just slightly excessive (just a tiny bit.) So, I had to re-setup the scene in Carrara 6 since it renders faster. That meant importing all the buildings and re-texturing them to look similar to previous scenes. Getting the windows to look right proved to be a real pain, and I’m still not happy with the look of them.

Even so I set up the shot and had it render through the night. I woke up and 4:30 this morning and came out to find that the stupid render stopped 3/4 of the way through due to a memory error. I had forgotten to close itunes and that might have had something to do with it. So I simplified the scene a bit and turned down the settings slightly and am re-rendering. It should look really cool if it comes out. It’s just that 3d, while really cool in a lot of ways can also be a real pain. But that’s just how it is. Another reason for the long renders is that I do my pages at 11×16 inches with full bleed. That’s much larger than final size but allows more flexibility and it looks better when it’s shrunk. But since this render has to be about 3350×2350 pixels, that’s a big render and takes a lot of time.

Now it wouldn’t take nearly as long to render, except that I’m using HDRI in order to make it look more realistic. HDRI essentially uses a special kind of photo that has extra lighting information. It’s like a lighting environment that envelopes the entire scene and gives the most realistic and subtle lighting available in 3d. Yet all I have to do is simply load up the HDRI photo I want to use and tweak a bit. I wouldn’t even dream of using it except that Carrara can handle pretty speedily compared to other programs. It’s still taking around two and a half hours, but that’s nothing in the 3d world.

So if the comic is running a bit late today, you know why.