Can anyone help me? My render times seem to be slower than they should be. I have a 2.54 pentium 4 with 700odd ram, but renders still take a while. Are there settings I can use that will make it use more memory or more virtual memory etc. I haven't really looked into this yet, but I hope there is so that I can do more stuff. Please let me know any useful techniques. Cheers people Rich

Attached Link: FireFly FAQ

You may consider tweaking the bucket size parameter. Higher values for that parameter make FireFly render faster but use more RAM - lower values mean less RAM, slower rendering. Note that when you set that value too high, FireFly can interrupt rendering in the middle when it runs out of RAM. Also, try to keep it in "real" RAM. When you use lots of virtual RAM, constant hard drive activity will pull down performance significantly. You might also want to try switching between raytraced and mapped shadows. Depending on your scene, one or the other may be the faster one. Don't set the pixel samples slider higher than necessary. Higher values may be necessary for effects like depth of field, but for general rendering 3 samples are enough. You can set individual shading rates for every object in your scene. Smaller shading rates mean high detail, slow rendering. If you have large objects without detailed textures or shaders, you can turn up shading rate to high values to speed up rendering. On detailed objects, you should keep it at 0.5 or less for production renders to avoid blurring. For draft renders, set the min shading rate in the render settings (not on the objects) to 32 for fast rendering. Just in case you didn't see the page I've been advertising like mad for the last days, my FireFly FAQ has an extra entry on speeding up render times.

Thank you again. You seem to reply to all my messages with great answers. I have been looking at your faq for ages and even used most of it, how could I miss that bit at the beginning? Ok, well I'll give it a go and hopefully It'll be ok.