Weekly update #7 (Patreon)

This week has not gone as planned. I wanted to set up smaller batches of scenes daily and let the renders go through the night instead of doing larger batches over the weekend like I'd been doing. But on monday my power went out and didn't come back on till tuesday. After the power finally came back on I tried to do a set of renders as planned but the renders took way longer than anticipated. The renders took about 3-4 hours each with the longest taking over 8 hours. the total render time ended up at about 36 hours. 

I decides to try doing some test renders to find out why they were taking so long. First I tried lowering the subdivision level on all object and removing smoothing modifiers from background objects. After that I disabled any objects that weren't in frame this didn't seem to help. I then reduced all texture sizes to 2k or less, still didn't help. Then I thought maybe the reflective surfaces like glass and metal were the problem, so removed any reflective surfaces that weren't  necessary and tried reducing reflectivity on anything that still needed it like mirrors. Still didn't help. 

After looking through the log file I found out my computer was rendering with the CPU instead of GPU. Apparently I hadn't updated the driver when I installed the GPU in my new computer so Daz wasn't using it. Updating the drivers seemed to help speed up renders a little but it was still very slow.

Finally after looking through various forums I found that HDRIs can slow down interior scenes. Set the scene to render only scene lights without HDRI. Now the scenes actually render much faster but the lighting is wrong. So now I'm going to need to redo the lighting in scenes that were using HDRIs to send light through the windows.