Tell me
this, have you in your life, created a spectacular piece of work, be it in CG
or VFX or Digital Art or any time intense field of art (not that there are any
other kind, but you catch my drift!). Then taken a moment to hit the render
button or go to full screen or even something trivial like change the view and
suddenly the worst thing possible happens - your screen freezes!!! Have you
then prayed on your knees to every possible God you know (yes even Loki
counts…) to give you one chance, just one measly chance to hit the save button
before the evilest thing technology can do to you happens – the file Crashes.
Well I was
a recent victim of just such an event. I had worked the better part of my night
on this major exterior environment in CG, and for once it was coming out
exactly the way I envisioned it. Like I was Michelangelo and I was creating my
own personal David. One of those beautiful moments when you’re Midas and all
you touch is Gold, only in a good way. All the modeling and textures had come
out beautifully and I had started to get into the groove with the lighting. I
spent 3 hours getting the scene to look just the perfect temperature of scary
and decrepit when the thought that I hadn’t saved in a while and how awful it
would be if it crashed now, crossed my mind. I cursed myself for putting that
thought out there in the middle of a test render and bit my nail to the bone
when the render seemed to get stuck at 89%. I prayed for the file to survive
and magically it churned out the remaining render. Having the attention span of
a teaspoon, I immediately got lost in the absolute beauty of the output and
forgot about that small voice in my subconscious screaming save, save now you
crazy person.
You would think something bad happened right about now… But
no! When I learn a lesson it’s never just half-baked, the misery of my action
has to completely scar me so I never forget the pain I go through. After
getting the lights right, I did half an hour’s worth of experimental changes to
the settings. Now any self-respecting artist will tell you that they always
know exactly what values they tweaked, well the term experimental is used to
cover up just that. There are times when you randomly tweak some settings over
and over again and suddenly you get absolutely smashing results. Only after you
see the result do you go back and check your stroke-of-genius changes.
I was glowing with my own brilliance and clicked on the
minimize render button so I could check out what I had done with the settings,
when things started to go wrong. I felt like my mouse pointer was stuck. I
rattled (banged) the mouse for a bit and tried again. No response. Swallowing
hard with a growing sense of panic I decided that I better hit the save button.
I hit the save button about 50 times all the while saying “please God
pleaseeeee..”. I made quite a few large promises to God about how I would be a
better human being and eat all my veggies if only this work would get saved,
but the tech Gods were not listening. Or probably standing by saying, "serves
the bugger right."
After working at full throttle for a good 5 hours my machine
had decided it had enough. Everything just stopped working. With the
temperament of someone letting go of a loved one, I banged my head a bunch of
times, cursed everyone and everything, threw some papers around the room but
finally accepted that shutting and restarting was the only way to see if
anything had saved. Nothing had. It was almost a career altering moment for me.
Needless to say I now save every 5 seconds. And no for once
I’m not exaggerating..!
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