Today we’ll take a look at Cycles materials.

Putting this week’s post together was a bit of a challenge because while I have worked a bit with Cycles, I still haven’t acquired the kind of experience you get after going through many projects. I started on the assumption that Cycles materials do influence a lot the rendering time but was baffled by how to optimize Cycles materials. There are no settings in the materials panel that would take a bit from the realism and speed up the render like in BI, so I thought that one way to use materials effectively in Cycles was to compare the different shaders, and learn to wisely pick the best ones for a specific scene. I made a kind of benchmark test with all the shaders and posted it on Blender Artists hoping to get opinions from you and other Cycles fans.

Today we’ll look into Blender Internal materials settings that can cause render times go up.

With materials, same as with lights, the more we try for realism, the more complex and slow computations become. In Blender Internal, raytraced reflections make objects come to life but kill the render speed.

This is the second installment about the light settings.

In the Light Paths panel of the render tab, right beside the No Caustics check box there are other settings that can cut a bit from the realism of the lighting scheme in favor of a faster render. Setting the max bounces to a lower value like 4 might not be so noticeable for some scenes, and depending on the shaders used, you can adjust separately the bounces for diffuse, transmission or glossy light paths.

Today we’ll look at lighting related settings. Since it’s a larger subject, we’ll have only the first part this week.

It is one of the 3d realm laws that rendering times will usually go up as our lighting scheme becomes more realistic and subtle and diffuse. We’ll take a look at a couple of settings that increase render quality in subtle ways and render time in a big way.