EVERY way to SPEED up Cycles! Up to 1000% - Blender 3D

if you're struggling with slow renders and this video is for you I've looked up every way to speed up blender cycles and come up with a list of 50 tips let's dive in first one may surprise you if you change from PNG to either Tiff or open exr as your render format when it is saving blender will save much quicker for whatever reason it has a hard time saving pngs and I've actually saved hours on some of my longer animation renders just by switching file formats temporal denoising is a technique that reduces noise across the sequence of frames by considering the color of each pixel and its temporal time-based context I've covered this on the channel before it's kind of a hidden feature in blender it can yield cleaner animations faster and thus lower sample rates it in a way here is a subdivision dicing rate setting and you can go ahead and fine tune this rate the lower the number the increase of detail and render time and the higher the rate the decrease in detail and render time may not even realize it but from the viewport to your render is actually eight times higher so you can go ahead and lower this to eight if you're happy with how it looks in the viewport and you can also check this off screen scale which will determine how much your objects are subdivided when they're not appearing on the screen under light capacitor you can turn on Fast GI approximation and this will approximate Global Illumination in a way that's faster than your typical GI calculation saving on render time while still providing a pretty similar result you can see here that from here to here I got about a 20 increase and there's not a huge difference in the visual quality with the fast GI just being a tiny bit darker in the blacks under the advanced settings of the sampling you can come here to seed and you can click on this little clock here and what that will do is change the noise pattern per frame and what that means is that rather than having a static noise that appears in every frame that's very obvious you can end up getting a noise like this that changes every frame and looks a bit more natural so you can actually leave a little bit of noise in your renders and save render time tucked away under light paths here is filter glossy which Smooths out the noise and glossy render settings for scenes like this by cranking this up you can smooth out that noise further and lower your sample rates at the cost of a little bit of accuracy ensure that you are optimizing your displacement maps for example on this beach here where I wanted to have this kind of bumpy fabric texture you can go ahead and use the vertex group here and set it so that only portions of your materials will actually displace so in my example I only have the scene close up to the camera displacing while the rest is just using a normal bump map and thus saving quite a bit on render time consider using texture atlases this is something that games like Minecraft do really well and for repeating textures use a texture Atlas instead of unique textures for each instance this can reduce memory usage and speed of rendering for example here on the coral we have one side of the coral that can be used for all sides of the block if you're rendering a complex environment consider using image projection by rendering out lower poly geometry with images projected onto it to give it the illusion of detail I'm not sure how relevant this is in newer versions of blender but it used to be that Spotlight lamps would would render faster than area lamps the reasoning being that Spotlight could be more controlled and focused whereas area lamps will kind of spray light out in a variety of directions thus leading to more light rays that need to be traced now most people know that fog can go ahead and add a ton of time to render time but if you come over to the volumes tab you can actually change the step rate render resolution and if we go ahead here and set a higher number which will effectively lower the resolution we can set this to something like 20 and even being 20 times lower we can't really see a visual difference in this instance so consider lowering your step rate to increase render times you should be decimating your background objects do you really need all the vertices the answer is probably no reducing the complexity of your scene can make a big difference in render times try using decimate modified or reduce geometry on background objects and make sure to apply it before rendering ensure you are optimizing your texture sizes for example this character right here their body texture is at 4K however their face texture is only at 1080P or 512. unnecessarily large textures can slow down your renders and eat up memory so be careful consider instancing your objects for example in the scene these Hills or instances the rocks are instances and the palm trees are instances when you're rendering copies of the same object using instances can reduce memory usage and speed up your renders you can go ahead and reduce instances instead of hitting shift d to duplicate objects you can instead hit alt D and that will create a instance instead likewise if you go to the shift menu you can come down here and create collection instances as well and do instances of entire collections the simplify optional blender allows you to globally reduce the complexity of your scene which can lead to faster renders it's a bit of a blunt tool so use it wisely you can cut down particles texture sizes subdivisions and more for here I've gone ahead and limited all the textures to 1024 which actually isn't all that noticeable in the scene consider lowering the amount of bounces that each light has if you grab a light you can come down here to the light properties and adjust the max bounces by limiting background lights that aren't affecting as much you can reduce your render times consider using camera calling back under the simplify menu if you tall down a calling here you can turn on camera calling or distance calling which will delete all the objects outside of the camera's view or from within a certain distance depending on the setting you have and for scenes like this where you have a giant kind of force with a lot of trees and objects that aren't being used this can help reduce render times limit your particle lifetime under the particle system settings you can adjust the lifetime here and by ensuring that it is at the lowest number possible you will get rid of all excess particles and reduce render times under advanced settings you can turn on automatic scrambling distance which uses a formula to adapt scrambling distance strength based on the sample count and this can improve GPU rendering it's not on by default because sometimes it can introduce artifacts for smoke fire Sparks or other simulations consider using pre-rendered image sequences there are plenty of stock action effects both paid and free out there and as long as you're not doing a heavy rotation you can't tell the difference if your scene doesn't require exact detail consider using bump Maps instead of displacement Maps this can greatly reduce mem usage and speed up render times here I have my wood and even though it's plugged into the displacement under my settings I have displacement set to bump only instead of displacement and bump this means that I get a similar result with much faster render times consider using a missed pass with a mixed node to create a foggy effect you can go ahead and control the intensity of the Mist effect by using a color ramp plugged into it where you can adjust the black and white values is the multi-resolution modifier to create a high resolution mess which will keeping the original mesh low poly which can save memory and speed up rendering it's great for sculpting more detailed objects like this and you just go ahead add the modifier and click subdivide a few times to get the resolution that you need now for anybody who's been part of three for a while this is a very basic tip but for those just getting started you may need to go into your system settings and choose your Cycle's render device if you do not have a video card you will come to none and it will use your CPU which will most likely be your slowest option if you have an in-video cards you will click Cuda and choose your video card and you can also do hybrid rendering with your CPU if you have an RTX card you can come over here to Optics and select your card and if you have a Radeon card you can come over here to hip and select your card I am on a PC but for Mac there is also a metal option now of course if you're already familiar with 3D this is incredibly basic but if you are just getting started the sort of sample rate directly affects your render rate the lower the samples the higher noise you will have in your final image but the faster render you will have likewise the higher sample rate you have the longer it will take to render as it resamples everything in the scene but the less noise you will have in your final render again a super basic tip for those just getting started in 3D but you should be denoising your renders by denoising you can render at much lower sample rates denoise the image and get a much faster render image overall let's talk about what some of these settings do first you need to check on denoise under render and then you have the option to choose which denoiser you want Optics tends to be better for the viewport and opens an image denoise tends to be better for your final renders passes down here Albedo will only denoise the color Albedo and normal will denoise the color and the normal which is what you want to put on and then you have pre-filter you can choose fast or accurate you're going to want to leave that on accurate in most cases over here under Light Pass we can control how many times Cycles will Trace all the various light paths and determine their accuracy however you can see here that we have some we're not even using for example by default transmission is set to 12 and transparency set to 8 I have neither of these in the scene so I can go ahead and set that to zero you can also see up here that diffuse is set to 4 and glossy so if I wanted to go ahead and set those down to two and limit my Traces by hundreds of calculations have you ever tried to move around and render view in your viewport and in the camera it is just moving so slow we'll consider coming over here to your output properties and clicking render region this will lock the render to just the view of the camera and thus you are only rendering a small portion of the screen make one whatever simulations that you can baking complex physics simulations or lighting into textures can save a lot of time when running it's more work up front but can pay off in the long run for example in this scene I have dust so under the particle settings I can come to the cache and bake those to my hard drive and render the scene quicker check out the noise threshold option you can set a threshold for the minimum amount of noise you want to be in your final render then you can set a Max sample and a Min sample or a time limit and what it will do is render up until the point that that is relevant now this may actually increase render times on still images but on animations after a few frames it'll figure out what it needs and render faster overall you can set custom GPU tile sizing under the performance set if you have a CPU leave it at Auto detect for Threads but for GPU use memory use tiling and then set the optimal tile size for a video card here for mine it's a large 2048 and you want to make sure those are powers of Two And if you look online you can find the optimal tile size for your render card but the most common sizes are going to be around 512 pixels now case cycles does cost a bit but it makes changes under the hood of cycles that can improve your render speeds by up to three times check out AI image upscaling you can go ahead and render your images at 50 and then use AI to upscale them which is a much quicker solution than waiting on more complex renders turbo tools is a utility add-on that can streamline your workflow and improve performance by automatically adjusting scene settings for optimal render performance it also does multi-noise depassing and has a great temporal denoiser meaning that you can render your scenes at much lower samples and see pretty huge increases in your render rates consider using images for backgrounds instead of modeling everything you can go ahead and render out complex backgrounds and this example here I had a bunch of hills with a ton of grass particles on it and then I can go ahead and just Swap this out for the rendered image and then now when I hit render I can save myself a ton of time here under the performance tab you can go ahead and turn on persistent data now this will take more memory so you may need a bigger video card for it but what it's going to do is store the memory per frame and thus reuse some of the information every time it renders in an animation and does not have to calculate as much per frame leading to much faster render times open shading language or OSL shaders and Cycles can improve render times in some cases due to their high level of optimization you can literally code nodes to do exactly what you want and improve render times CG matter has a great introductory course to how to use OSL Shader so check that out polygonic just released this new add-on which doesn't increase render times per se but it allows you to render more complex scenes because it optimizes your seams for vrams you can find yourself constantly running out of vram check this out be careful when creating your scenes and having overlapping geometry when you have too many overlapping geometry can cause unnecessary calculations for cycles that are hard to figure out and this can slow down render times try keeping your meshes clean and avoid intersections when possible consider turning off Ray visibility for objects under the object properties and array visibility you can turn off which Rays it's visible for example I don't need this to be visible to transmission volume scatter or glossy Now by turning that off I can reduce the calculations blender has to do in the render without getting a visual difference when you have a lighter light bounces on interior scenes you can get things called fireflies which are bright little pockets of Noise by playing with the clamping settings here you can reduce those fireflies in the noise effectively however will also reduce the incoming light that you have so use very small numbers here but by incrementally increasing these you can reduce your render times on some scenes consider turning off motion blur and instead using Vector blur enable passes Z and Vector then in your compositing tab add a vector blur node plug the depth into the Z and the vector into the speed and you will see here that it can actually add that motion blur back in post the field can take a long time to render so try decidling it on your cameras turning on your z-pass coming over to compositor put in a defocus tab plug the depth into the Z your image into the image and then use the Z scale to set the depth of the Focus consider disabling Shadows on objects that aren't contributing to the scene for example these background trees are more there for their visual color so I can go ahead and turn off Shadows here without much visual difference consider using low poly objects for your Collision objects for example on this King character here I didn't need all this complex geometry so I went ahead and generated this simple shape that is easier to calculate for renders now what you can do to create this is all you have to do is go into your complex objects switch into edit mode select everything and then type in convex Hull and it'll create a simple object shape around your character consider using an LOD system you can do this automatically geometry nodes and distancing by reducing the geometry of your objects but what you can do for example are take these rocks and these are Level 2 from a rock pack that I have and you can see that these are pretty low poly and then the Rocks up front are a bit higher poly and what this does is allow you to optimize your scenes for faster rendering and mesh loading avoid emission lights whenever you can they lead to more noise so whenever possible use a actual light object instead you can even disable the lighting on your emission Shader setup and put a light in front of it instead to get a faster result optimize the materials for your scene for example image-based materials will load faster but they will take up more memory procedural materials will not load as fast but they won't take up as much memory it's best to bounce between the two for example when using a large environment you might need to use 8K textures so you might want to look at procedural options instead as that may be faster but however for your character where you can get away with 2K textures you may want to lean into image-based textures instead consider using fake materials for example using light path nodes you could set up and fake certain effects subsurface scattering is a great example of something that takes forever but you can actually fake some of those color changes with various procedural nodes as Olaf 3D shows here in his tutorial and you can get similar effects with way lower render times when using hair particle systems consider using the B spline option under render path it can be faster for certain situations

Channel: SouthernShotty

Views: 53,382

Keywords: blender, blender cycles, blender cycles x, blender tutorial, blender cycles render, cycles, blender speed up render times, cycles render, speed up cycles, blender cycles x render settings, how to render fast in blender cycles, blender 3d, speed up cycles render blender 2.8, blender cycles render settings, speed up blender cycles rendering, cycles x render, blender 3.0 cycles x render settings, blender render settings, cycles x blender, blender reduce render time

Id: tapTU-xxAZA

Length: 15min 5sec (905 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 08 2023