speed up render times just for lights setting up?

Support Lighting and Rendering
1

I’m trying to get my lighting right but the render times are just brutal…takes too long to see the results of the render.

is there a way I can make all the objects have no more CPU overhead than necessary just so that I can get my lights and shadows how I like?

dunno if I need to dupe the scene, make everything solid and gray, get my lights right, then import them into the “real” scene?

thank you for any suggestions!

ray

2

You’ve probably been at blender for a while raycat, judging by when you joined here - but anyway I’ll give you my workflow if it helps…

For heavy scenes I will render just certain layers - if it’s a room, I will just render the room with a single object in it, then as the lighting improves the way I want it, I will then move onto engabling other layers to test them. Then do the full render when all looks well. Reducing Subsurf for the render can speed up things drematically - might not look great, but if you’re just setting up the lights/shadow/mood, then who cares about the details. I guess it really depends on what your scene is though. :wink:

3

thanks for sharing, Jay

4

You can also try turning off Ray tracing and Shadows under the Shading rollout of the Render TAB. Disable anit-alias, render at half-size. Turn off those soft shadows you may have on your lights. Under Sampling just use 1.0 for sample and 1.0 for soft size. Set all reflection/mirror materials to use 1 ray bounce.