Faster rendering using Cycles Adaptive Sampling (with tips)

[rawalanche]

Yes, AS will not actually speed up rendering. I wrote more about it here:

Cycles Development Updates

People often mistakenly assume that adaptive sampling means faster rendering. That’s not (technically) true. What adaptive sampling means is even noise convergence. So typical example is: You have an image to render that has a few strong highlights in defocused DoF or motion blur The image is pretty clean already after 10 minutes/500 passes but takes another 30 minutes/2000 passes for the noise in the defocused highlights to resolve to acceptable level, making rendertime 40 minutes total. You …