Sunday I spent five hours trying to make the lights on a reasonably good P4 render "improve" a P5 render of the same scene. When I rendered the scene as saved in P5 with Firefly, it looked different from last year's (ie, screwed up). But that's Ok; I've learned tons about shadows and stuff and I wanted to try that anyway.

As the work "progressed," I flashed back on the percentage of my creation time I had spent on the lights the first time I worked on the scene (Standing Stones). I began to sweat and shake. After the fourth hour, I took the dog for a walk. Might as well. The scene was "rendering."

Finally after five hours of tweaking, rendering, turning each light off in turn, turning it back on, checking shadows, rechecking, rendering, tweaking, changing intensities, switching infinite lights to spots, tweaking, moving spots, rendering, adjusting saturation, tweaking, checking shadows, rendering, I got a result I liked.

I put the result beside the render from last year, and it was the same--no better, no worse--except that the camera angle had shifted slightly at some point so I couldn't just replace the alpha channel in the composite....

I've decided to buy an Etch-a-Sketch, if I can find one.

Mick