Since the release of 0.3 Beta 1, I have been continuing to work on the lunch with Jamie and Kathryn scene. The first two shots and Kathryn’s introduction animation are now both posed, the shots are rendered, and the animation is currently rendering. Kat’s intro animation is the longest animation I have done to date and it is also completely asymmetrical, so there is no way to shortcut the render, I have to render all 961 frames. Keeping the quality I want, this is going to take a long time to render, over a week. 

I don’t want to lose all of that posing time, so I needed a solution to allow me to continue spending time posing further shots while rendering the animation. I could just have it render in small batches whenever I am not doing posing work, but that’s going to end up wasting a lot of time in small chunks as scenes are loaded and unloaded to switch back and forth, so I’ve come up with another solution. First, a little background, my current setup consists of two computers that I use for developing Unexpected Consequences. I have my 3D workstation, which is a custom built Windows machine with a 9th gen i9, 32GB RAM, and an RTX 3090Ti, I have so far done all of my posing and rendering on this machine. I also have a 2016 MacBook Pro that I use for writing, coding, and project management. I use DAZ Studio for my 3D work, which does have a Mac version, and I had already installed it to play around with some ideas for future projects while my primary workstation was busy. I decided to try using it to continue posing the lunch scene while rendering the Kat intro animation, so I have installed the necessary assets for the lunch scene on the Mac and have started to continue posing. I can’t render anything from the Mac since non-glacial Iray rendering requires an Nvidia GPU, but it is working adequately for posing this scene.

My current plan then is to continue using the Mac for posing and then render them on my workstation. This should work well through the lunch scene, but I will have to go back to posing on the workstation for the next scene as adding in the models for Mia and Alice will push the memory usage too high for me to get acceptable performance from DAZ on my Mac.