Hi there, I'm wondering if you have any rendering tips. I just made a scene involving a baby zombie, and I rendered it using the "good" render option (not the "draft", the other one) and it took me like, 4 to 6 minutes just to render the whole still picture thing... Are there ways on how to minimize the render time? I'm a little bit worried for animation as well. I mean, if one still picture took already that amount of time, what more for animated renderings? Sigh....... Thanks in advance people... (By the way, how does the rendering work for, let's say, an animation I made? Does the long waiting time for rendering happen at the start only, or for each and every frame? I guess the draft render looks good enough...)

If you have shadows on and reasonably large textures, 4-6 minutes for a render in Production mode is not excessive at all. They do take time. There are many ways of limiting the render time. I remove bump maps from figures that are not close up. If you can't see the bumps anyway, you can save render time there. For figures and props that are not close up, you can also try to reduce the texture resolution. You don't need a 2000x2000 face texture if the face is just 20 pixels wide in the finished picture... You can reduce the texture size in a picture editing software. For an animation, the total render time is pretty much the sum of all individual pictures. No way to get around that. This is the reason that Hollywood animation studios were the biggest customer for Cray supercomputers when those were the computers of choice...

Most techniques to minimize render time involve a tradeoff between speed and image quality. Lower the resolution; if you're using raytracing, lower the number of raytrace bounces; lower the pixel samples (antialiasing); avoid dynamic hair and atmosphere; etc. Some of the Material Room's shader nodes (the Reflect node, for instance) have quality settings, also, which can dramatically affect render time.

Much of the pre-render wait (each frame, unfortunately) is due to shadow-map calculations. If you have plenty of memory, try using raytraced shadows instead of shadow maps. You'll need to set each light source to raytracing.

Thanks... very informative indeed=) I'm gonna try those out in my next few scenes... heheeh have a cool time people=) By the way, I made a zombie scene in the horror section of the art gallery, that's why I noticed the render time hehe...