Rendering can be slow sometimes and everyone will face this issue even if they have a good computer, however this article will tell you exactly what you have to do in order to render faster in Blender without losing the quality of the render by just optimizing some basic render settings.
Render Properties
Open blender and head to the render properties, you can find that in the properties tab.
If you can’t find this tab, drag a new tab and switch it to properties tab or press “Shift F7” on your keyboard.
Note that this is only for the cycles render engine, this might not work for other render engines.
Device
Firstly, change your render device from CPU to GPU compute if you have a compatible graphics card.
GPU (Graphics Card): Renders images much faster because it has a lot of cores which divides the render into small pieces.
CPU (Processor): Slower than the GPU because it has fewer cores.
If you don’t have a graphics card, this option will be gray for you.
Click edit on the top left corner and open preferences, go into the system tab and select the render devices according to your GPU.
If you have a Nvidia GPU, try Optix and if you have an AMD card, try HIP.
Noise Threshold
If you scroll down, you will find a noise threshold value under the sampling tab. Make sure you are changing the settings under the render tab and not for the viewport, you can copy these settings for the viewport if you want a similar speed in the viewport.
What it does is that it stops the render when certain level of noise is present or reduced in the render, a lower value will give less noise but it will increase the render time, the perfect value to achieve both quality and performance is 0.1, it works most of the times but if it gives bad results, you can reduce it point zero seven five.
You can keep the samples at 1000 as the noise threshold will stop the render automatically. Set the denoiser to open image denoise and set the quality to high.
These will be your final sampling settings:
Light Paths
The Light Paths settings in Blender's Render Properties control how light behaves during rendering. These values help manage the number of bounces or interactions light can have with surfaces. Adjusting them affects render quality and performance so it's experimental.
The value of total bounces is 12 by default, but you can change it to 8, and it will work fine. Make sure to check your render in the viewport to notice any bugs or glitches. If you find any, try to fix them by changing the value to 9 or 10.
Performance
After that, scroll down and find the performance tab which will be under the film tab.
Go under the acceleration structure menu and you will find “use spatial splits”, enable that.
After that, go under the final render tab and you will find “persistent data”, enable that too.
What this does is that it loads all the texture data for the first frame and it reuses that for all of the other frames thus making it faster.
Generally if a project has a lot of textures and assets, it takes about a minute or two to calculate the textures for each frame, when these options are enabled, the textures are calculated once and are reused for the other frames.
Output
Blender also takes a lot of time to save the output image in png, you can also save some time here by changing it to something that is optimized and fast.
To change it, go to the output properties tab, you will find it under the render properties tab.
Under the output tab, change the file format to open EXR and Codec to DWAA (lossy).
Render Test
These new settings will reduce your Blender render time by approximately 20%.
Here is a test render with the default settings and the new render settings.
There is not a big difference in the quality of the render and the render time is decreased from 21 minutes to 43 seconds.
You can increase the quality of the render by changing the width value under the pixel filter tab, you will find that under the film tab.
Change it to 1.00px and it will give sharper renders. Here is a difference between a higher pixel value and a lower pixel value.
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Check out this video tutorial made by Extra 3d:
