memories

had a profound remembrance today, doing what i had previously thought a mundane task and tried to think positively about during the last log. i suppose i regarded it as a trivial, time consuming thing with no potential of any intellectual benefit however, rendering out these item icons and many times re-rendering them, i remembered a very important factoid from college. while i was waiting on these renders and wondering what i could do to speed up the process, my mind fell on bit depth. initially, the consideration was if i could save time by rendering at a lower value, such as 8-bit. previously, i had considered directly to target resolution to save time, but this was to iterate on changes faster, given the current assets are gemstones, with many different time consuming and numerous attributes to render without further delay, the epiphany came while trying to color-correct time consuming renders in Photoshop. for whatever reason, my render time at this point was over an hour and a half when it was previously under a single sixty minutes bit depth can be essential to post processing! any sort of color-correction or image application where VERY SUBTLE changes in value can have a great impact on the final result would benefit greatly from MORE VALUES to try! i’m not sure why i was trying to compensate for image levels after making the conversion from 32 float to 8-bit, but essentially that was my mistake. luckily, i still have all the floating-point images and can, by my estimates save about a day or two render time. unfortunately, this will likely make me spend more time trying to create dual and tri-colored gems