Swell Time FMG WIP 2 (Patreon)

WIP, BTS, preview of tomorrow's sequence.

I'mma rant right here, so you can move along if you don't care.

This character is driving me crazy. A little behind-the-scenes info on how I do sequences. I typically take 3 days for a full sequence. The first day I set up the scene, pose the character, all that good stuff. I also typically take the WIP images at that time, because that's really the only time I'm doing something at all worth showing until it's done, and then I post the first WIP image. The second day I render the first half of the sequence and post the second WIP image. Yeah, the longest part of making these images is typically the rendering, so it get 2 days. And on the third day I finish the last half of the renders and post the sequence.

This sequence has been different, because this character has been fighting me for decent render times. Yesterday (day 1) I actually spent most of my time trying to tweak settings so that the character could render in time to hit that 3 day window. I figured I got it to a decent state. Today (day 2) I actually did most of the scene setup that I normally would do on day 1, but then I also rendered the first half of the sequence. That rendering is what's driven me crazy. The first 3 frames of the sequence took about 3 times longer to render than I needed them to, which that time was what I thought I had gotten figured out yesterday. I found after rendering the first 2 frames that the hair still had some reflectivity on it, so I disabled that and rendered frame 3, but it took roughly the same amount of time. After that I thought, "well, maybe something got switched back. I'll try rendering frame 11 to see how long it takes, since that's the frame I was testing with yesterday." So then I rendered frame 11 and found that it still rendered at the speed that I had tweaked it to yesterday. Now, that seems crazy, because all my previous sequences take longer to render each frame as the girl gets bigger, but this sequence seemed to be doing the opposite.

Well, anyways, then I went back and rendered the rest of the frames from the first half and they were all at an acceptable speed of render. For no reason. Either there was no good reason for the first 3 frames to take so long, or there was no good reason for the other frames to take so long. I don't know. It's driving me batty.

Alright, that's the rant. When I post the finished sequence tomorrow the first 2 frames will still be the original renders with the hair being ever so slightly reflective. If you pay close attention you might be able to see the difference that that slight reflectivity makes on the hair by comparing frames 1 and 2 with the rest of the sequence.