Rendered a 3D scene for 3 days straight then realized I had the lighting wrong from frame 1

I was in my home office at 2am tweaking shadows on a demo reel for a client, feeling proud until I noticed the entire sequence had a blue tint because my key light was set to 6500K instead of 4500K. Had to restart the whole render overnight and pray the deadline wasn't blown. How do you catch stuff like that before you sink hours into a final pass?

2 comments

2 Comments

ray_miller413d ago

Pre-render checklists man, that's the only way. I started keeping a physical sticky note on my monitor with like 5 things to verify before hitting go. White balance, shadow catcher on/off, camera clipping distance, motion blur samples, and output format. Takes 30 seconds but saves days of pain. Also started doing a single frame render at like 25% res on a dark part of the timeline just to check color temp before committing to the full sequence.

the_cameron2d ago

Started doing the same thing but with a dry-erase board right above my monitors lol. Also got into the habit of rendering a single frame at full res before bed so I can spot any major issues in the morning before I waste a whole day.