Optimal Render Settings - your ideas

[ProjectX]

I've noticed the worst offenders (for me) for render times are:

adding the reflective shader (as apposed to the water shader) - probably because the reflective shader uses a higher-quality setting by default

using the voronoi function to control cloud position (turns a simple 1 min render to an 8 hour one - although I can't for the life of me think why)

using GI at all (I've only once turned GI up to 3, and I'm rendering it now, it still hasn't finished the pre-pass and I'm 40 hours in, I never turn on GI surface details from sheer fear)

Adding extra light sources (most notable point lights)

Populations (although my laptop can't normally render them due to RAM issues), large heightmaps and crazy displacements (bar one, which I did on fake stone shaders with stone sizes of 10 and some nifty displacement on it too) don't really affect my times too badly.

[EmDee1]

About a week ago (July 21st) I wrote in the topic concerning "render uncertainty":
"Working with the fill lights setup and reading around on the forums these days (Oshyan's fill lights, Moodflow's), at the moment I tend to think it's better to turn off GI anyhow. It won't be as easy as that I think, but anyway I see some advantages:
-a great (very great!) decrease in render times
-more possiblitities to adjust lightning
-with GI turned on, a small (and I mean a real small) change in camera point of view will change the lighting in the final render dramatically; even so: crop rendering a part of the image with GI turned on differs a lot from that same part in a full render, etc. So GI off means more "render certainty": you know what you will get...
It isn't always easy to get the right lightning settings with the fill lights setup and GI disabled, but in my opinion the advantage of decreasing render times is tempting.

[Volker Harun]

EmDee1 ... I agree to a certain point.

Some scenes just need GI and Enviro-Light. The point is that you can adjust the amount of lighting seperatly for atmospheres and surfaces. This is a wonderful improvement.
Think of a dark scene with dramatic sky. You set in Envirolighting the effect on atmospheres to zero and the terrain gets some lighting.

At the moment I need to render with fill lights, soft light and with GI turned on. Anything else turned out to be a halfway good image.
Latest when working with overhangs, I love GI ,-) Else I alway try to get the image finished without using it.

[EmDee1]

Hi Volker, untill now I didn't bother much about the Enviro-Light; just used the default settings, I didn't know what to do with it to be honest After your comment I played around with the settings and I agree: Enviro-light can play a big part in a scene! I made some renders with GI on and GI off-with-Fill-Lights. The renders look quite the same, only render times vary: in this case GI on took less render time than GI off (I didn't expected that ), but my settings for GI on where very small (both 0.5).
So it isn't as easy as I hoped at first: turn GI off and replace it with fill in lights; each render you have to find a right balance between GI settings (as low as possible I think), Enviro-Light and Fill Light settings...