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).
