Page 1502…
It’s still Wednesday!
🙂
I found out why the renders were taking so long for today.
It had NOTHING to do with the processor speed.
There’s a BUG in the renderer.
If the scale of the scene gets too big…it slows down incrementally.
The sea bed that spans into the distance goes out for about a mile (relatively speaking).
I did a test render at lower size and settings and (with the sea bed) it took 10 minutes to render.
I deleted the sea bed…. 30 SECONDS!
So, you can imagine when I render full size and it normally takes 4 hours to render…it would have been a 4 day render.
PER FRAME.
Anyways. I scaled the sea bed down and managed to finish the page today.
Should be fine.
Still… the new computer pumped out its frame in 12 hours (not bad considering the other computers weren’t even a quarter of the way through by then)
I’ll hopefully have Thursday’s page up sometime by dinner time.
Thanks for your patience.
Oh…
And if anyone’s interested in how I work out the story points for each chapter to write…
Check out this post on Facebook…
https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10150914935231810&id=316374741809
This comic hooks you.
I see two possibilities:
a – Parents are really dead and she will finally move on.
b – They are alive and extremely well and have all answers and everything goes happily ever after.
I’m betting on A.
So I started reading the other day and got caught up today. WOW! Fabulous story and artwork. 🙂 I’m hoping to buy the books soon.
In the meantime, we know that Natajia and Alex aren’t the first inter-world couple now, but have we been given any examples of successful inter-world relationships? Just wondering if they all end tragically.
I can think of a few more:
c – One is dead, one is alive, Nastajia is both overjoyed and heartbroken.
d – They’re both alive but have been imprisoned for the past 10+ years and know nothing.
e – They’re alive but in another dimension and it’s like with Felicity and Nicole: They can see each other, exchange message, but never meet.
f – Abaddon has them, and the price for getting them back is no war between the Nightmare Realm and Dreamland, and he gets to keep all the human children his pirates kidnapped. If Alex and Nastajia refuse… (sound of two throats being slit)
A bug in the renderer? I actually ran into something like that recently–only reason I got to troubleshoot it was thanks to Maya’s output window repeatedly recording some error message about it not recording photons over a certain number. Apparently MR at least gets confused if stuff’s too far away from the light emitting the photons, like they end up too far for the computer to trace them. So it keeps emitting, tracking them, loosing them, going “WTF?”, re-emitting, tracking, and loosing them. . .
Ah, 3D. Both so cool and SO frustrating!
(Side note, been reading for a few years, and only just now commenting. 🙂 And let me say, starting at the bottom of the ocean and then having to go high enough birds and dragons can’t manage? Dang that’s going to be a long trip! I’m betting something harasses them on the way. If not Nicodemus, or the Nightmare Realm, then they’re probably going to be harassing each other in impatience!)
Hmmm..a bug in the renderer. Fun. You mentioned software upgrades at one time. Perhaps there is a patch or an upgrade you can buy and, perhaps, a nice customer service department to talk through problems. I loved Sun’s until right before they were going belly-up and sold out to Oracle. Always ‘fun’ getting routed to another country where English is perhaps their third or fourth language and all are bad. 😛 Oh well. Too bad you can’t get into the processing network like the one Purdue University is making. I think they are are making 500+ core nodes and are working towards 1000+ core nodes. Gutted the basement of the Math Building and putting in metre wide water cooling pipes. Whole thing looked sick. They are going to be renting out processing time like the good old days. Oh well.
And now you know why older console games just fade into mist after a certain distance. Rendering all that STUFF takes resources they dont have ^^;;;.
So how did her parents get to seraphopolis?
Lasers, has to be lasers. 🙂
Wouldn’t Niviene know they went there if she was the only one with the knowledge of these wee islands?
we could list the possabilitys from A to Z and still not cover them all. from nic wasnt killed but escaped and took Nastajia’s parents away OR her mom and dad are both now slaves in the human city…OR one is dead >the other is dead> they are both dead. OR fill in the blank and so on.. we will just have to wait and see… AGGG hurry i cant wait…
I don’t think Scott has given us anything yet about interworld relationships beyond Alex-Nastajia and Merlin-Niviene. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the kings of the past had fallen for a Dreamlander, but we have only been given a couple of those kings’ stories (Arthur and Rameses).
That’s assuming she’s the only one with the knowledge of the islands. Nastajia’s parents may have read a few more of the tablets than she had access to before Nic went on his rampage. *shrugs* They may have bypassed Niviene entirely…and maybe they got eaten by sea monsters trying to get to those islands. We’ll have to wait to see what really happened.
Oog… bugs… I hate them.
It’s actually not necessarily a bug in the renderer, but more of the way that the renderers work. They throw out a beam of light (or a photon), and record it’s movement until it strikes a pixel and is bounced back, or until it leaves the scene. This is done millions of times until every surface in the scene has been recorded, or some threshold of “good enough” is reached. When your scene has a mile long stretch of seabed, and no obstacles to stop/reflect the light, then it will take longer. (just imagine how many pixels are in a mile-long stretch of scenery, and then multiply it by millions of photons)
…anyway, this is why indoor scenes normally render faster than outdoor ones…. (just my 2 cents worth) 😉
Actually, 3D rendering is primarily done using one of three algorithms: Scan-Line, Ray-Tracing, or Radiosity. There are some other methods (volumetrics and such) but they are usually used in conjunction with one of those main three.
What you are describing is more of a hybrid ray-trace & radiosity mechanism. Which would be pretty computationally expensive. Considering radiosity solutions already can take days to run on supercomputers for a single high-resolution scene. Ray-tracing is ALMOST doable in real-time now, as long as the scene isn’t too complex, and the resolution isn’t extremely high.
Most modern renders use a hybrid scan-line & ray-tracing algorithm. It provides very good speed in areas where there are no reflective or refractive surfaces, but provides good realism in those reflective/refractive areas. Usually done by having objects that have either quality render into an extra buffer, then raytracing only those pixels.
Interesting… I wonder if it’s a series of portals which have to be done in sequence to get to the desired destination. Hope we find out soon… 😀
TWC report time. #4. 6,549 votes. #3, 6,726. 20 days to go. Can we catch up with them?
Let’s vote and see.
Does this mean Dreamland is about to go science fiction?
I really hope Dreamland is about to go science fiction. 😀
I don’t know, I may still consider it a bug or at least a programming flaw. I’ve run into other cases where, in Maya at least, it finds that the render is taking up too much power or stuck in some other way, and automatically aborts the render. Yet for some reason, once in a while with large distances or infinite space, it somehow allows this ungodly-slow render to continue.
Let’s just say…
I’ve added a little “steam punk” to it…
Oh, YEAH! ^_^
This I am looking forward to…
Exactly my question =P thank you~
Really liking where this is going.
Just a note, we’ve seen the phrase ‘combination of magic and technology’ a few times in recent pages, it’s starting to become noticeably common. Not sure how else to put it, though…hmm, I’ll have to get back on that.
If it truly is a world of dreams there should be no limits!
(Like Fantastica* from the Neverending Story)
*Or Fantasia if you’re going by the movies.
Please do.
I hate to be repetitive.
They’re going to Los Angeles? Well, dang…they could’ve just caught a flight on Southwest…
wait wait wait…. back up a minute. if no mythical flying creature( including nick) can get to the island, then how did nast’s parents get there in this first place? wasn’t it nick who sent them there begin with? and isn’t the island only for humans where no magical being are allowed?
further more, the only limit at what point dragons and other mythical creatures can not fly is when the air becomes too thin to breath, and i doubt the island would be that high up or the humans would suffer from thin air too, but of course, this story is all bout MAGIC!
Wow… amazing on the new render results. I’m actually kicking myself for not thinking of that, Scott. That bug actually comes from limits on the size of the picture, if I remember my rendering science correctly. Render time goes up exponentially as you try and fit more than one thing/color into one pixel (actually learned about this dealing with hair/fur). I’m surprised I didn’t think about it…because your render times have always seemed a little off for the result we see… but I’m glad to see you’ve fixed it. New rule of thumb for you then, eh? If you can’t see it, get rid of it! lol 🙂
Borrowed from Girl Genius–perhaps with a few Jagers to keep an eye on it??? (We should be so lucky)
Given your above comment about steampunk, using ‘mastery of engineering/engineers’ and ‘machines’ in place of technology would work. I don’t recall if you’ve established if magic users are called ‘wizards’ or ‘sorcerers,’ but that would give you the options of ‘wizardry’ and ‘sorcery.’
So the above sentence would be something like, “Only by harnessing their machines to the magic of Dreamlands were the humans of Seraphopolis capable of truly separating themselves from our world.”
I don’t mean to be knit-picky about every word, just thinking of other ways it might flow.
Much appreciated.
Okay. Looks like Thursday’s shot.
One last bit still rendering.
Will have the page up in the morning. Promise.
My thought was that Dreamland just has a very tall sky, and folks’ wings get tired.
Is it just me and my deuteranopic eyes, or does the overall color of this strip seem… *red*?
My best guess is that either Nicodemus, having been around when Seraphopolis was made, had some means or getting them there and they found some excuse for him to send them, or that they had some ancestral writings explaining how to do it.
I wonder though where the name of Seraphopolis came from? Etymologically it is a Greek word (the Serapheim are a type of angel), and it is supposed to be inhabited by Egyptians. Would the denizens of the city call their own place something different, while the name of Seraphopolis “stuck” with all the greek-culture children to visit Dreamland post-creation?
SQUEEE!!!! 😀
lolz!
I don’t think that the island has a sign saying “No Magic Peopling Allowed.” 😛
It’s not entirely just your eyes. Panel 3 is a little less warm tinted overall…but Niviene and Nastajia are still quite golden with hints towards the red spectrum.
“Seraphim” (or “serap”) is actually Hebrew in origin… though the “opolis” part of Seraphopolis is definitely Greek.
It will be interesting to see what Seraphopolis is like, but that looks like a long way off.
The new pages look awesome. Colours are much more vibrant! Love it!
The sword states that Alex, ipso facto, is king. Everyone assumes that there needs to be a TRUE KING. The sword didn’t though. The rights passed to Alex.