To make a scene render faster, do any of the following:
- Diagnose the scene to find ways to render the scene faster using Render > Run Render Diagnostics. You can use this tool to monitor how well you optimize the scene and to search for limitations and potential problems that
may occur. For more information on render diagnostics, see Run diagnostics and mental ray for Maya diagnostics.
- Perform scene optimizations:
- Avoid memory swapping by:
- Closing all applications before rendering to maximize the amount of memory available for rendering (including Maya if rendering
from a shell or command line).
- Setting the TEMP or TMPDIR variable as the location for temporary render cache files: -TMPDIR (Linux) or - TEMP (Windows and
Mac OS X) to make plenty of room for temporary rendered files. Make sure that the value of those variables points to a local,
fast hard drive, not a network drive.
- For Maya software and mental ray for Maya, () lets you select a reduced resolution to test render the scene. For more information on test rendering strategies, see Visualize interactively with IPR.
- For Maya software, if the scene contains several identical surfaces (for example, multiple spheres), use in theRender Settings: Maya Software tab to improve rendering performance.
- Turn off motion blur if you don’t need it (the Vector renderer has no motion blur). For the Maya software renderer, use 2D
motion blur instead of 3D motion blur when possible. See global attributes and in the Render Settings window for details.
Use average BSP (mental ray for Maya) settings
When mental ray for Maya raytraces, it calculates the effects using an average of the depth and the average of the leaf size
settings of the BSP.
To speed up subsequent renderings, you can render instead with the average settings (instead of your initial settings).
Find the averages in Maya's Window after you render the scene the first time (with set to or above in Render > Render Current Frame > and Render > Batch Render > ), then change the settings in the section.
Example averages found in the Window
- RCI 0.2 info : main bsp tree statistics:
- RCI 0.2 info : max depth : 40
- RCI 0.2 info : max leaf size : 114
- RCI 0.2 info : average depth : 22
- RCI 0.2 info : average leaf size : 7
- RCI 0.2 info : leafnodes : 8185
- RCI 0.2 info : bsp size (Kb) : 393