Performance
Various effects, especially increasing quality of soft transparent shadows
and increasing anti-aliasing quality, impact rendering
time. Test effects with low settings first, then increase the values
for the final renderings.
Refractions |
Image quality |
Increasing the number of refractions increases the rendering time. |
Reflections |
Image quality |
Increasing the number of reflections increases the rendering time. |
Caustics |
Lighting |
A higher number of photons emitted by lights produces better results
but images take longer to render. |
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Global illumination |
Lighting |
As the
photons bounce around the scene and hit an object, they store the color
information. The distance that the photons travel and the strength of
the effect is determined by the photon energy. More photons result in
more realistic effects and slower performance. |
Indirect illumination |
Lighting |
Indirect illumination can be time consuming. Use the smallest amount
of indirect illumination necessary. Objects send out sampling rays from
each pixel in the image and gather the color information on what the rays
hit. More rays result in more realistic color bleeding and slower performance. |
Fog |
Lighting |
High settings fully calculate fog effects, slowing down performance. |
Contour rendering |
Image quality |
Additional calculations for contours increases rendering time. |
Ray Trace Depth |
Image quality |
Small Ray trace depth values
increase rendering time but decrease memory usage. The rendering time
increases because PhotoWorks needs to test the intersection of light rays
with more complex objects. Memory usage decreases because PhotoWorks creates
fewer objects. |
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Shadows |
Image quality |
Soft shadow calculation with high edge quality can decrease performance
significantly, but images with soft shadows look more realistic. |
Anti-aliasing |
Image quality |
Use Medium setting for first
look, High as final for most models,
Very High for final rendering
of reflective appearances like mirrors. Rendering time increases significantly
for Very High quality. |
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Other strategies to improve rendering performance
Instead of rendering the complete scene:
In the Preview window:
Memory Allocation
If a rendering task exceeds available memory (when a large assembly
is loaded, for example), cached information is released from memory. The
information is recalculated rather than cached, increasing rendering time.
Enable
memory settings ensures that the system does not run out of
memory and so can complete the render operation. Rendering is slower,
but the task is accomplished.
Related Topics
Batch Rendering