MirceaKitsune
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M1nt3r F0r3zt
🕑 Added 2021-04-01 17:15:23 +0000 UTCChristmas 2020: I created a render series called Winter Forest in Blender. All of the simulations, including volumetric smoke with cloth physics and other pre-baked effects, were compiled in a range of 100 frames... this was enough to give me satisfactory results at low build times, the final render taken at frame 100 obviously. What I never mentioned is an inexplicable behavior which manifested in the Blender software upon completing the last render in the set; This is intended to document my encounter.
The software proceeded to render frame 101 next... despite the end frame of the scene being set to 100, while I was certain I told it to render one frame and not an animation. I tried pressing esc to cancel rendering with no response, followed by trying to close Blender and even kill its process which also failed. The window froze and remained unresponsive during this time, I couldn't see what was being rendered but 100% of my CPU was in use so it was still working on something. It took precisely 6 hours, 6 minutes, and 6 seconds for this invalid frame to process... once it did Blender immediately crashed and finally closed on its own.
For a few days I thought it was just a Blender bug and shrugged it off. The time came to backup my data to the external drive after the new year, which is when I usually go through some of my Blender stuff to see what I should copy over. That's when I saw it: The result was automatically saved, with the file name bloody_forest.png. I hovered my mouse cursor over it: The preview embedded in the png showed the thumbnail you should be seeing on this submission, a red version of the lamp that sat on the ground in the original render. The contents of the image file, once I found it in me to open it from Gimp, showed the unthinkable; Everything changed and became distorted... the pose, the compositor settings, even the materials had effects not possible with the material nodes I originally used. I spent the next hour in shock staring at the image; I wasn't sure whether to delete it... granted that I could, at this stage I feared the OS could crash or my hard drive might get corrupted if I attempted to. I tried to forget about it for the rest of the day with little success.
Then the dreams started. That night is when I dreamed of it the first time: I saw myself in that landscape, smoke coming out of that bloody snow as if lava was underneath it, yet it still felt cold to the touch. I sat there waiting for her to come... the red vixen, I knew she was there, coming for me slowly. Her intent I could not make out... she seemed more scary than I could describe, yet I could feel she wasn't there to harm me. In some versions of the dream I would see her through the trees: The black silhouette of a fox, her head always facing to look at me, occasionally distorting in ways that should not be biologically possible. That's when I'd begin to hear words I couldn't make out echoing through the trees, seemingly in an unknown language... only some appeared to resemble english, the only two words I could make sense of were "in" and "me". Those dreams repeated periodically every few days, sometimes multiple days in a row... they've gotten a bit rarer now, maybe she's letting go of my mind somewhat to observe my reaction?
After more than three months of this, I took the decision to post the render that shouldn't be. I don't know if it will make the dreams go away, or if I may be cursing others with it instead. I don't even know if this render will upload correctly or if I'll see anyone again once I click the submit button. I know for certain only one thing: She won't stop until I face my fear... until I accept it's for the best... until I step inside her never to go out for the rest of my existence.
