Degrading renders

ddiemetric

I’m doing a final render on my scene for the first time. I’m outputting it in multiple files because I want to put everything together in Photoshop on multiple layers. For example, I rendered just the background, saved it – that will be on one layer. Rendered the model, saved it, that’s another layer. And so on. The first few came out great. It took a while to render (more than an hour) which was as expected. However, without making any changes to the rendering settings, the rendered images are now taking only about 10-15 minutes to render and they appear unfinished. As I said, I changed nothing. I restarted DS and reloaded the scene. Same result. Has anyone got an idea of what might be wrong? Thanks.

Richard Haseltine

Not what I was ecpecting from the title - fortunately.

Is this happening even if you re-render one of the earlier passes? Are you loading separate scenes for each part? Render Settings are stored in the scene (by default0 so if so that could be applying changes (you could try File>Merge to add one of the "bad" scenes to one of the good ones, then delete the unwanted elements).

ddiemetric

Thanks for responding, Richard. I think "degraded" renders would have been more accurate. :-)  Anyhow, I think I figured it out, though I'm still baffled. When I said I didn't change anything... I did one thing. I saved my custom render settings. I started out using an existing preset, which I then modifed (changed the number of pixels/ratio). I used that for the first few renders, which came out fine. I figured I should save the preset, just in case, and it was at that point that the renders became degraded. Why would saving a custom preset cause trouble? I can think of no reason. I deleted it and then selected the existing preset again, modified the number of pixels again, and it's working fine. So, who knows? I'm just happy I can output my work. Thanks again.