Hello and welcome to this weeks Dev Diary for Project Taival!

For the past two weeks I have been trying to find solutions for the slow rendering times, but haven't found anything that would be sure to fix the problem - other than to render on lower quality. Which brings me to one of this weeks topics; quality comparison of the CINEMA 4D Renderer on Adobe After Effects.

Just today I came up with an idea to do some benchmarks with the quality settings shown today, so  I couldn't get the estimated time it would take to render on these settings on this weeks Dev Diary. I will do a Follow up next week and render the first 25 seconds of the video on each setting.

The Comparison

These were rendered with full resolution and 32 bit color precision. As you can see, the differences are the greatest among the quality setting 01 and 25, which erases most of the pixelation seen on the lowest quality image. The differences between all the other are so small, that for best comparison, you would need to see them change on top of each other, to pick up the differences better. Which goes to show, that this project most likely doesn't need any higher setting, than 25 after all. The highest quality picture does have the best color blending, as the sample rate is the highest possible, but is it worth the wait?

Still, the rendering time will probably be so long even at the 25 quality setting, that I need to run it on our secondary, much less powerful, 4 core PC, so that my main computer can be used for anything else. 

Unfortunately I have nothing to show about the text graphics yet, as I have been sick for the last week and haven't had the strength to concentrate on actual work.

I have, how ever, watched trough several tutorials about how to make 3D and fake 3D text on After Effects and come to a conclusion, that this is the one I'm going to try and utilize in my video; How To Create 3D Glass Text In After Effects

I have also watched tutorials on how to make timers and found this one to be the most helpful for my purposes; Countdown Timer With Expressions

Conclusive Determination

Even though I'm frustrated on how much longer this video project has taken than I had anticipated, I'm happy that it has progressed even in these tiny steps forward. One of the struggles have arguably been my perfectionist sense, that was never really happy how the floor looked and couldn't just let it be, even when it looked good enough. Other was the earlier mentioned forced re-location f the actual floor element, due to the addition of camera, which threw the original perspective out of whack and misaligned the floor.

Not to mention how much it took time off from creative work when my PC was acting up couple of weeks ago and scare me to death with it's BSOD boot loop, as suddenly my computer seem to have finally snuffed out. Luckily, lowering my memory settings below it's specs helped to this, but the computer is a tad slower now, luckily only a few percentile.

At the same time, it is not helping that occasionally your time is spent more on finding ways to optimize your workflow or solve performance issues, than actually being able to do the creative work you love to do. The world of an artist would be so much easier if they had tools that "just works". To have something even close to that would be much too expensive for my budget currently, but I will get there eventually  At least I learn more on the way, including patience and tenacity.

But on a positive note, this is the actual final version of the floor;

This is it for this weeks Dev Diary! Thank you for tuning in and I'll see you next week

And as always, you can check out every possible mid week announcements about the project on these official channels;

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