What are your methods to boost up rendering times?

There are many things which you can do to improve the render speed. Here are some simple examples:

In settings:

For 64 bit Poser - if you have plenty of memory - you can render 'In-Process". This will speed up the render process from 0-10% depending on the scene

Use the advanced render settings and learn what each setting does. Use the D3D Render Firefly script to get even better control over the settings.

The settings you need are dependent on the scene and your quality demands. Using low shading settings, increasing IDL quality and pixel samples all cost rendertime.

In your scene:

Using high values for blurred raytrace shadows increases render time

Having high values for quality in refraction and reflecion increases render time dramatically if the surface is large. Lower the quality on surfaces such as floors.

Multiple layers of transparency is very expensive in render time.

The single most important is :
Have a clean Windows 7 system.
Defrag it.
Run something like, and it just came out;
Advanced system care free, version 5 from iobit.
Run deepclean , a one click solution.

Or Glary Utilities, or Winutilities, certainly CCleaner.

Please forget all about AO and IBL light if you are rendering with IDL ; ON.
It works, but is not worth the internal calculations time rendering battle.

Lights; I can be very short on this subject. There is only ONE sun.
For outside renders : Always render with ONE infinite light in BB's sphere.
That is more , and I repeat more then light, as mostly you will have to turn the light down to 50-60% in intensity.

For inside renders, use ambient where needed.
On the TV screen, the PC sreen, the TV screen, the lightbulb, the candle.

Try:
**Cast shadows ON
Raytracing ON
Raytrace bounces 2-3 : start with 2
Indirect Light ON
Irradiance caching 0 – 30 : start with 0 (all the way left)
Indirect Light Quality 7
Pixel samples 3-5 : 3 for speed (5-7 for quality)
Min shading rate 0.5 ( 0.2 for optimum detail and 1.0 for draft)
** Bucket size 32
Smooth Plygons : As required
Use displacement maps => If you use a displacement map somewhere
Post filter size 2-3
Post filter type sinc
Gamma 2.2

Build from here.
Happy posering

Humungous processor and not using FireFly mostly :biggrin: