January 01 - Happy New Year!

[Rick 4F]

And have a great 2019! 

So I've been trying past days to squeeze out a background for my first image of 2018. I had this free credits on Google Zync worth 300 bucks or so and decided to make use of it to get a feel for the service. Basically I setup my render as usual but instead of rendering it here out I let Google do it. It's probably best used if you do animations but I was "I don't do animations" so lets see how it works with stills. 

It's driving me crazy.  

One big problem is that you can't see the progress the render makes. Is it at 1/3, halfway? Almost ready? Your guess is as good as mine. So I cancelled my first render after 24 hours as it was too much even for Google.  Then I tried what I am working on now as it's not as heavy. 
Before I go further I must explain that I learned to chop my renders up in parts. This way if something is wrong I notice it a lot sooner then if I wait for the entire render to finish. I gave Google Zync 1/3 and ran the same here to see how much if any benefit I get. Zync finished 2.5 hours earlier on this project on a 32 GB machine. I didn't try a 64GB  machine as that costs too much to try things out and that would quickly gobble up all my credit. Plus thing is that I don't have to deal with the heat the render machine produces.

And then I noticed something odd. The fog I have in my outdoor scene floated halfway in the sky. 
I do many, many, many many! pre-renders while I'm working at a background and I was sure the fog should be several meters lower. So I do a pre-render on my machine and yup, the fog floats way too high in the air.

There's no reason for that but it is. I go back to an earlier backup file and check. My fog is positioned in the right place so I redo the fog, check it, check it again then send it renewed to Google. I go to bed, wake up happy happy as I have my first part rendered, check the file and the fog is once again up in the air. Not only in the render but also in my original file that I just hours ago had fixed!

It's insane but somehow activating Zync lifts my fog up in the sky?

Don't mind the little jump and missing figure, I had to use an old render but you can clearly see the fog jump up, which is Zync's work somehow. If it's at the bottom it is how it's before I use Zync, if it's up it's after using Zync. Mucho weirdo!

So in the end I ended up rendering the background out myself. It sux because the background would had been ready by now if guggle hadn't fuggled my fog up. 

To be continued!