My rant for the weekend... you're warned...
So, last night, I wanted to go for a fetish/latex render. So, I used some multi-use latex Iray shaders, to turn the character's skin (yes, the entire outer skin, plus nails) into a super-tight latex suit. Then I added the bad habit outfit, modified the shaders to hit a specific style, added a scenery, optimized the texture sizes... saved... restarted the suite... and, loaded the saved scene, thinking "I should be good to render". I setup my usual render settings, make sure the emissive lights are in the right values and hues, and hit render... and, that's where Murphy's law slammed on my head. With 240 Mbytes of geometry, and some 400 Mbytes of textures, I should be fine to render, I've rendered with nearly 1.5 gigabytes before CPU would kick in (Yes, my humble little GPU is a GT 1030, with a mere 2 Gigs of GDDR5 VRAM). After precalculating the basics, and before Iray starts the iterations, the Nvidia driver crashes. At first, I thought "Must be somethign with the mesh lights...". I rebooted the system, reloaded the optimized scene, removed all but the main mesh light, tried again.... driver crashed. I thought "OK, must be something with the scenery geometry". Rebooted the system, loaded the scene, changed the surrounding scenery, loaded a simplified "corridor" made by simple sci-fi wall props and a plane as my floor. Tried rendering... driver crashed! "Fuck, something in the scene has weird geometry" I thought... rebooted the system, opened a blank scene, added G3, same skin re-shading into latex. Avoided adding the nun outfit, only added a corset, and a gas mask, and a skydome as background... driver crashes, yet again! I give up, and leave it for morning, hoping it's only some freak glitch from prolongued running through the day. In the morning, I load a blank scene (computer had been turned off for some 10 hours by that point), a G3 base figure, shade in latex. No gas mask, no hair. skydome and optimizing, trying to render... driver crashes! At this point, and while I'm trying to make the most of it with Poser, I'm out of options on what to think. My GPU acts fine on full stress, I've already tested its limits after the last driver crash.
OK, rant over, you can carry on...
