To further accelerate the process of iterative rendering you can render small areas of an image, using Maya's Render Region. Image rendered at 320x240 (Rendering time: 21 seconds):īy rendering the scene at half the original dimensions the render time is cut by over half. Now use Maya's 'Test Resolution' Render Globals settings to switch from 640x480 to 320x240 and render the scene again: Image rendered at 640x480 (Rendering time: 59 seconds): Similarly, half-resolution or quarter-resolution images can be used quite effectively to experiment with large-scale changes to a scene, like shadow placement. Often a small test image is all that is necessary to establish the basic 'brush strokes' for a shot. An image with a resolution of 640x480 will render much faster when the resolution is reduced to 320x240. By rendering smaller images, you can substantially increase the speed of your preview iterations. Image resolution has a substantial impact on the time it takes to render a frame. Go ahead and open the tutorial file, rendering_efficiently.ma. This tutorial will give an overview of which RenderMan quality settings have the biggest impact on your scenes. For final frames, high quality setting are essential. For preview rendering, lower quality settings are often an acceptable trade-off because that allows for faster iterative renderings. Often you'll find that you want to use different settings during different stages of the rendering process.

There are various controls that you can use to adjust render speed and quality.

To get started, let's open the Maya scene, rendering_efficiently.ma.

Renderman render settings