Speed up rendering in 3dsmax

Below are a number of ways to speed up rendering in 3ds max

The number one reason to speed up render times is so you can focus on other tasks instead of clogging up your computer and waiting for the render to finish. Wouldn’t it be great if we Could forget about rendering altogether? This is where RenderNow comes in handy!

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Let’s dig into how we can save time on your computer or if you’re going to use a render farm these tips below should help you save time and money using one. 

1 – Use proxy objects for cars, trees, people, furniture and etc “Itoo Forest Pack Pro Is great for plants and trees.”

2 – When you send a render to be rendered, change a viewport display to Bounding Box, or using wireframe will save on memory.

3 – Try to avoid using ‘Force 2-Sided’ option under Render Setting > Common > Options.

4 – Lower samples. Try Min – 1 and Max – 4 and if you are not satisfied with the quality then use higher samples.

5 – Use a net render using a second computer or distributed bucket rendering.

6 – Don’t use big image files for materials.

7 – Merge all modifiers.

8 – If objects are far from a camera, make a material simple. No reflections No bump.

9 – Use ‘Draft’ setting for Final Gather. Also, render out AO map and do some post.

10 – No Global Illumination for exterior scenes. Not 100% but most of the time.

11 – Try to avoid using Autodesk Material Library materials. Use A&D materials.

12 – Optimize the scene where possible. Using tools such as the Optimize and ProOptimizer Modifiers on as many dense objects as possible can increase renders speeds and scene calculations.

13 – Where possible, reduce the number of lights in the scene. Fewer lights will create fewer calculations, resulting in faster render times. Using the Light Lister to disable lights is also an option.

14 – Disable Receive / Cast Shadows on objects that do not require them.
(Right-click the object > Object Properties > Rendering Control > Receive Shadows/Cast Shadows)

15 – Repeat the above step for “Visible To Reflections/Refractions.”

16 – Reduce the number of reflections/refractions in the scene.

17 – More calculations = longer render times.

18 – As much as possible limit poly count to a minimum.
the more poly the slower the rendering.

19 – If you’re using vray, always proxy the ones with high poly count.

20 – Don’t put too many subdivisions on your shadows (as much as possible).

21 – Remove unwanted objects from your scene.

22 – Material wise: avoid using too much.

25 – Be wary of iteration levels when making curves/mesh smoothing

26 – Instead of using dof in physical cam, Photoshop can do the trick with an ease with Z-buffer channel or plugins like Alien Skin’s DoF and DoF Generator PRO by Richard Rosenman.

27 – Post process can short the rendering workflow, professional composition programs like Autodesk’s Combustion and the likes.. just know variations in render channels in vray render elements.

28 – Irradiance and Light Cache (save to file), skip the computation when using the same sets and scene over and over again.

29 – Use always the default parameters for fast test renders.

30 – Attach those objects – 3ds Max is much more efficient working with 9000 10k polygon objects than 200,000 1k polygon objects. Attaching all the components that are not being individually animated adds a significant amount of speed and flexibility to the scene you’re working on.

31 – Geometry Proxies – Ah yes, my new favorite tool! A geometry proxy is an optimized piece of geometry that is designed to load and render much more efficiently in specific render engines such as Mental Ray & Vray.

32 – Bitmap Proxies – Bitmap proxies are a great way to minimize the amount of RAM that you are expanding on a scene.

33 – Work Locally and Incremental Saves – Why you ask? Well, as you save to the network share, you can run into some traffic issues which can on occasion cause crashing and corrupted documents.

34 – Layers, Groups and Selection Sets – Any organized 3ds Max user has used these at one time or another, though some more than others.

35 – Maxscripting – it can bring repetitive and laborious tasks to heal. This has saved me countless of production hours and has allowed us to tackle projects that would be impossible with the stock tools in 3ds Max.