Use
single-sided instead of double-sided surfaces (which is the default)
on the object’s Attribute Editor. The biggest
speed gain is for the Maya hardware renderer.
Tessellating
large surfaces requires a lot of memory, so use several small surfaces
instead of one large surface when you can. The renderer is more efficient
with smaller surfaces.
For
Maya software rendering and Maya hardware rendering, use bump mapping
instead of displacement mapping.
For
Maya software rendering, make bump maps flatter. To do this, reduce the
value of the Alpha Gain attribute, which
smooths the bump map and reduces the number of samples of adaptive
shading. This technique only works when Edge Anti-aliasing is
set to Highest Quality. The texture
bump looks flatter when the Alpha Gain is
lower.
For
Maya software rendering, turn on Use Displacement Bounding
Box when using displacement maps.
For
Maya software rendering, use layered textures when possible, instead of
a Layered Shader. (See
Layered shaders and
2D and 3D textures in
the Shading guide for details.)
For Maya software rendering and mental ray for
Maya, if you are raytracing the scene, set the Reflection
Limit and Refraction Limit to the lowest values
that produce acceptable results.
For
Maya software rendering, in the
Render Settings: Maya Software tab on
Linux, Use File Cache avoids re-tessellation of the same surface
during rendering. Turn on Use File Cache to store geometric data
in a separate file in a location that you specify (the default location
is /usr/tmp, but you can
set a new location by typing setenv
TMPDIR xxx, where xxx is the name of
the directory where this file is output).
