Don't You Just Hate it When...
Knittingmommy
Posts: 8,191
You think you have everything in your scene placed just perfectly. The lights are perfect, the poses are perfect, nothing in sinking into a surface and you run a test render and it's perfect with the exception of just that one thing. And then...
I had that happen just today. I thought I had everything perfect and then I noticed one thing being cut off the bottom of the camera view and I wanted the whole object in the frame. Except, instead of moving the object, I moved the camera back just a smidge and expected that to be a perfect fix. Hit the render button and walked away. Only to come back to a black screen because that tiniest of adjustment backed the camera just enough in the wall to still show my scene in the viewport, but enough into the wall that nothing actually rendered and was done in like 5 minutes so I lost about 20 minutes of rendering time when I thought it was still rendering and wasn't!
I undid the camera adjustment and ended up moving the object which is what I should have done in the first place. Grrr!

Comments
Yup. I've done it. We like to say, "Congratulations. You have discovered...black!"
LOL!! That's funny!
Just title the render "Black bear chasing a black cat through a coal mine at midnight"
Hmmm, I could do that, but it was SO not the look I was going for!
Wow, I've had that happen so many times. Sometimes I don't realize that one wrong element until after I've posted the render, even if I do postwork!
That's humiliating. I don't know whether to take it down or leave it in the gallery, to remind me to be less careless. :-)
In sort of the same vein -- do any of you ever get irritable and grumpy if there's something off in a render, and you can't put your finger on exactly what it is?
All the time! It happens with a lot of my renders, unfortunately.
Yep, I can relate.
Another annoying one is when you have everything in your scene, get your camera placed. Then you start moving around thinking you're in perspective view getting everything arranged "just so" and go to jump back to your camera view only to find you're already there :(
Only lost 20 minutes? Most of my test renders take a couple hours.... and it usually takes a few. My last scene took 13 test renders before I got it 'good enough'.
So... yes... I feel your pain.
Yep, I've done that more times than I can count. Someone, somewhere, here on the forums, suggested locking the camera once you have it set in the view that you want and I've started doing that. No more moving the camera thinking I'm in perspective view. As long as I remember to lock the camera, that is. :)
Let me clarify! That was 20 minutes lost when my computer was sitting there doing nothing while I was thinking it was doing something. Before that, I had run I don't know how many test renders. I usually stop counting somewhere around 20! (I that's about how many fill up the bottom of my screen when I mouse over the ones I'm not saving but haven't closed out.) And, those were the test renders I didn't save. I have several saved renders of this setup, too. With all those glaring mistakes that I had to fix. I've been working on this scene, off and on, since yesterday when I started what I thought was going to be a real quick render. Apparently NOT! I almost scrapped it or thought about recasting the figure I had in it, too, because I didn't like how the lighting made the skin look, but I, finally, managed to get the lighting and the skin to cooperate so that they look good together so, now, I'm letting her rip and it will render now until done, which on my computer, may take until morning.
For me, it's when you set everything up and you get the dreaded invalid ID error and the app must shut down. You can still see your scene, but can't save it. As soon as you click ok, the app shuts down. ARGH!!!
That's only happened to me a time or two, thank goodness. And that was in an older version of DAZ Studio.
But that is the pits, especially if it's a scene that I've worked on for two days.
Thank you for passing that along. :-) I've juggled my camera out of place so many times. I started adding an extra camera, just to play around with.
This!
This for me. It inevitably happens when I get lax and haven't saved in a while. It happened again recently, but I don't recall if I was in 4.8, or 4.9 Beta.
I swear I changed to perspective view before I moved.... :D
...once I get the basic scene blokced out and the render camera set to the angle and framing I want, I lock all of its transition sliders. Saves a lot of pain and frustration.
I still have a Bryce render cooking from 2002... I check once a year to make sure the computer is still running and if it has started antialiasing yet... Almost there...
That's an excellent idea....
I have got to see that render when it's finished, in about 50 years or so....
I have got to see that render when it's finished, in about 50 years or so....
Heh, heh heh... I knew that would get Chohole... But seriously, I love Bryce. The only big issue for me ever, was the render times... The longest one was several days... But that was back on my (then) state of the art Mac G3. I used to read the books and wonder how many thousands of computers are they using to make those trippy alien landscape videos.
I feel I've let Bryce down... After getting a more powerful computer last year I still haven't loaded Bryce onto it.
Now I'm thinking back to my state of the art Mac LCII and doing Ray Dream Studio renders to make 100x100 pixel images. Oy.
Ha! I still have Infini-D on that Mac... If you still have Ray Dream, maybe we can combine them and make Carrara... ?
I still have RayDream
but not for Mac. 
Lol! I have no idea do I? Back in the day I played a few simple games on the C64, but my first computer was an i5 quad core with 8gb ram, and I think that is slow?
haha, I laughed when I read this.
Then I remembered I'm reading this on my spare PC while my main computer is doing nothing but a Bryce render for this month's contest, and has a milk cap taped over the power button so I can't press it, because I kept forgetting and turning off the computer a week or so into the render when I finished browsing for the day and went to bed, and had to keep restarting the render. Then I cried.
But on the bright side, Bryce keeps getting faster the older it gets, since I keep upgrading PCs over the years.
...hehhehheh
For me that would be a Daz render using Reality/Lux in CPU mode. At my current age, I would most likely have to will the render process and computer to some eleses care for it to finish.
Are you using a recent version of LuxRender? I've found that Lux 1.5 and 1.6 has a really fast CPU renderer now.