DOH! -- (As Homer Simpson Would Cry)
At first, dear friends, I thought there was something wrong with my
eyes. I would set up an Apophysis render, let it run then look at the
final output and wonder why it looked so dark.
Today, after months of working with the program in an attempt to
learn as many of its secrets as possible on my own before resorting
to tutorials, I finally figured it out. It seems Apo renders at 2/3rds
the brightness of the preview window! Whether this was deliberate
on the programmer’s part, or a beta “bug”, only the final release of
2.08 will tell.
Unfortunately, when I set up the render I was so proud of for a new
run, with the brightness corrected for the fault and a larger size and
finer quality, I found I was most likely in for a run that will take most
of next week to complete, if not more!
Hence…the title of this post…sigh.
But stubborn me, I’m going to let it run anyway, just to see if I am
right and it will look like I wished it to this time. Current Apo time:...
558hrs00min23sec and counting…
Stay tuned for Monday’s report.
Scott Bricker
huh? have never had anything like that…no probs with brightness at all (other prog bugs, but nothing close to that…) have always had it come out exactly as the unrendered preview showed…not sure what you mean…gamma/bright? any settings should give the output that you view in preview
do you mean 558 hrs. render time? jeeze…I do high quality 7200×9000px x300ppi renders in about 15-30 minutes...think I must be misinterpreting something here…If you use the ‘zoom’ slider to zoom in, the render time increases to the ridiculous level: set ‘zoom’ out…most of way to left, then use ‘scale’ to zoom into the degree you want…the preview in the editor will be VERY low res, but the render will come out great, and VERY fast…takes some getting use to the low res preview, but worth it in reduced render time…the full screen view is still good, use ‘render more’ to see what would be closer to your final product…
also don’t use a high ‘quality’ setting…I have done extensive test images done at diff ‘quality’ settings, VERY little diff in output qual, but an extreme increase in render time…much better to increase the pixel dimensions of the render, then when used, on screen or printing, you get, in effect, ‘oversampling’....looks great; excellent, high quality large prints, no pixelation (my main interest, I am VERY picky about output quality for very large prints, small ones are very easy…)...upload time sux, though…large file size, don’t compress it too much…
I think I must be misinterpreting what you wrote, if so, sorry…contact me if there is anything I can do…something is not right if it takes that long to render ANY size…the max pixel size limit on Apo is around 22,000px, by my tests, would never take that long to render even that size…
BTW, make sure you backup your ‘MyFlames’ folder continuously; Apo has a very bad habit of deleting it w/o warning…poof! gone….have had this happen to me, hundreds of params lost, have talked to others at devientART that have, had a friend new to Apo have it happen just recently…a
MAJOR bug of all versions/types of Apo…happens without any warning…if you have rendered them, and checked ‘save params’, there should be a copy of those params there…really, back them up!!!! it does this without input from the user…
forget about using ‘oversampling’ option unless you are doing tiny renders…massively increases RAM needs to the point of ridiculous…
I have used ‘quality’ up to 70,000…overnight render, 12hrs+, same image size at qual= 1000…15min. render time…very little noticeable diff in quality of large image…really!!! (AMD 3Ghz dual core/4Gb RAM/XPsp3)...Scott
Hypnogoddess replied
I do need to email you, Scott.
For one thing I am not working
with anything as modern as the
machine you have, though I have
an option on such a computer.
Single-core Sony VAIO 2.66Ghz
P-4, 5 yrs old with only a half gig
of RAM, XP Home, sp3.
I’ve taken the oversample down
to 1, the prog will not let me go
0…and perhaps it is computer
differences, but I have found
that increasing the quality
does affect the output qual…
at least on this old VAIO.
BM me and tell me which
Apo version you are using,
please?
Hypnogoddess replied
Ah! Forgot one thing, Scott…
I’m using the the Zoom to and
out from rectangle function to
do any zooms; however this one
has no zoom at all. It could be
that the darkness could be due
to my monitor…but the only way
to find out would be to poll viewers.
Do you have a Deviant Gallery
by any chance?
Scott Bricker
at dA i presume? yup…here…SBricker @ dA it shows that you just added me to your watch…yeah, the gamma adjustment on your monitor really makes a huge diff in appearance…will B-Mail you, or note me & leave email address if you prefer that…shrtly, here…
your computer sounds ok, with the exception of amount of RAM…that will be the logjam for rendering…need a min of at least twice that with sp3…you may be (almost certainly) using you HD swap file…very, very slow…laptop?
yup…the minimum for oversample is 1; that’s ok
try setting the radius to something like 0.0001
instead of 1…
my Zazzle Gallery is… SeriousFunStudios@Zazzle
my main website is Serious Fun Studios
using Apo 3dHack (old right now), 2.08 (2.02 core, of course)
also, what size images are you rendering…’quality’ does make more diff at smaller sizes…later!