Rendering Without the Planet Object

[rcallicotte]

Perhaps this will be a "light" subject, but if you have insight into this or have tried new ideas around this method, I'd like to hear everything.

I have recently discovered cutting render times by multiple times just by turning the planet object off (disabled), after setting up all of my other objects and lighting, etc.  When I render the other objects under this situation, the render times are much, much faster.  The only problem you might have is if you are really concerned about shadows coming off of the other objects.  In that case, I remember someone talking about a workaround, but I don't remember who said it or what they said. 

[dandelO]

Another way is to just uncheck render surface in the planet properties, and then use a big enough plane as the terrain/ground/etc.

I imagine disabling the planet completely would result in no 'normal' to calculate from or to(I don't know this though). And even if your plane terrain is lower than the surface you'll still see it, and you can also still control the original atmosphere settings, I'm not sure that works if the planet is disabled either and that might be why it renders so quickly for you.

I'm not sure I'm following you correctly here though, why would you want to render your objects, placed in your scene, on top of nothing? Is it a space scene or something? I think I've got the wrong end of the banana here.

[rcallicotte]

I discovered that the objects render faster, when the planet is disabled.  Uncheck render surface might be a better solution.  I'm just playing around and discovered a way to make faster renders, but not having an atmosphere is a problem.  This is a cool way to test our object renders, before running a full render, nevertheless.