Only another artist will likely understand this. And maybe programmers. Possibly engineers. And research scientists. And anyone else who has to experiment to get final results.
I stayed up late last night, playing with Apophysis to learn some new fractal techniques. I thought I was really getting the hang of it. Something beautiful appeared in my render preview window. So, I took the advice in the tutorial I was following, and set my render settings according to the instructions. Once I started my render, I discovered that it was going to take a couple of hours to run.
Fine.
I left the computer to compute, and went to bed.
Got up this morning and checked the computer. The render had completed. Yay! So I decided to go for a larger image of the same render. Set it up, started the render, then went to start my day. I checked back every so often to see the progress. At last, the status told me the render was complete. Total time: 7 hour(s) 18 minute(s) 38.39 second(s).
Excited, I opened the render in PhotoShop.
It was crap.
I made the mistake of not checking the previous, smaller render, to see how it had turned out. Had I done so, I’d have realized that the settings were not optimal for this fractal. I had the density setting up way too high. Everything came out looking like scattered pixels, rather than the beautiful, swoopy design I saw in the preview pane.
So, now I’m restarting the render with a much lower density setting. Estimated time to complete: 1 hour, 36 seconds (total). We’ll see how long it really takes, and if it’s a success or not.
