This is a little complicated: after more than a year away from the Catwalk project, something made to push the limits of my system and learn about the new render engine at the expense of not having canon chapters, the knowledge and the size of some textures have grown a lot, also, we've been able to do more comics in less time... and that's something Catwalk of Dreams was not built for.
After updating the characters skins, the 3D project proved inviable with my current hardware, it takes too much memory... unless I used auto optimization, something I hate because it butchers my girl's skin, and we love massive close ups, right?
The quest to save memory has begun, making me find multiple mistakes: unused textures loaded, multiple maps for the same region, massive maps for characters that barely show up in the scene... and it happens to most characters.
These days I've cleaned every base model in the audience, lowered resolution, built clean resources for future projects and did what I thought impossible, saved about 4gb of raw Vram! But that's not enough to avoid crashes or memory freezes... not yet at least.
Meanwhile I've been checking other characters and cleaning them, this work will take some time and is another massive effort that will bear fruit in the future, after all buying new video cards or systems is impossible in most countries right now, also for me in my actual circumstance.
Looking at the bright side, this is being a healthy and super productive PAUSE, the improvements, invisible to eyes, will show themselves in future projects as more characters and perhaps more comics will be able to show up in scene more frequently.
Right now I'm reworking the room in order to gain another couple of gigs before the next test. Wish me luck.
Note - I have Giselle and Jessy in scene for the test, let's hope the following optimizations allow me to build this render set soon so I can share it with you guys.