is there anyway to speed up cycles.
im trying to render an animation at 300 passes. so far at pass 12 its taken half an hour.
trouble is, i have 600 frames :eek:
try a lighter setup for the lights bounces like direct lighting, try with less bounces.
anyway it’s completely normal if you have a complex scene.
Are you rendering with CPU or GPU? Best way, though not cheap, is rendering by GPU and - if it’s still slow - buying one h*ll of a Nvidia graphics card. Not cheap, but it will be fast. Er. ;D
I think you have just encountered the basic equation.
Cycles + Animation = Sad Face.
as far as im aware im using cpu. i have nvidia 7950gt. but im on linux so its not giving me the option of gpu.
thanks for the tips 
probably your library is not linked, check the blender executable with ldd or update your driver.
you just spoke double dutch to me there 
isnt there a way to render stills more that once and combine them in composite mode for a less noisy picture, save me using so many passes? i came across something like that but cant remember the name of the technique
yes, but it is the same as rendering for longer,
pretty much what you do, is you render the same frame twice, to the same amount of samples, but with a different seed for both (its in the render settings somewhere)
then once its all finished, you can go into the compositor, create to input > image nodes, then create a colour mix node and mix them .5… this will mix them together
thats a bit pointless, time spent rendering two images may aswell use that time on the one
isnt there a way to render stills more that once and combine them in composite mode for a less noisy picture, save me using so many passes? i came across something like that but cant remember the name of the technique
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