Render Optimization
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Render optimizations are methods and techniques that aim to improve render times, render quality, or sometimes a combination of both. These include modifying the behavior of the engine or modifying the scene itself.
Optimizing Scenes
In many cases, optimizing the actual scene itself can improve render times or quality. Some of these include:
- Reducing geometry, or optimizing topology (e.g. using quads instead of n-gons)
- Reducing texture sizes (e.g. using 2K textures instead of 4K)
- Adequate routes for light paths (e.g. large gaps)
- Avoiding complex materials or adjusting materials to behave differently (e.g. archviz glass)
- Reducing resolution of the final render
Optimizing Engine Behavior
Often times optimizing an engine's behavior can also allow for reducing render times or scene quality. Some examples include:
- Limiting light bounces, or even approximating lighting through alternate means
- Adjusting sample count for ray tracing engines, often in conjunction with [Denoiser|denoising algorithms]]
- Adjusting shadow resolution for rasterized engines
Software/Engine Specific Recommendations
The following are recommendations for specific programs or render engines. Depending on the scene, these may or may not need to be adjusted.
Cycles (Blender)
Although Cycles is one of the faster path tracing engines, there's some options that can be adjusted for performance.
Sampling
Beyond adjusting the sample count, there are alternate settings in Cycles specifically related to sampling. In particular, adjusting adaptive sampling settings to kick in earlier on can reduce render times, at the cost of more noise. Setting the noise threshold to instead of may be a good compromise of quality and render times.
Another sampling related setting in Cycles is light tree, which reduces noise in scenes with a heavy amount of lights, but may cause more noise in scenes with fewer lights.