RENDER SETTINGS FOR VUE

1. You do NOT need blurred reflections or transparency for most renders, so turn 'em off. Unless maybe you have a close up of a very reflective surface dominating the scene, ti's a waste, and blurred reflections on materials is a huge waste of render time, just use a bump map or dispalcement instead if you want blurry reflections, unless you have special reasons.
2. Depth of field. Are you using this? if not, turn it off. You can easily render Depth of Field masks out anyway much faster, using black and white materials for the entire scene's materials to cut render times.
3. Are you using motion blur, including wind on plants? if not, turn off Enable Motion Blur. Likewise turn off Optimize Volumetric Lights, unless you find it's needed.
4. Optimize last render pass, turn off
5. You don't need physically accurate caustics on most scenes so turn 'em off. Underwater where waves throw light caustics down below, or with glass objects refracting light onto another surface is where you want such turned on. Say , some jars of perfume on a sun-lit table they'd throw caustics onto the table, that's when you'd want this turned on.
6. Advanced Effects Quality normally you never need this higher than 50%
7. DPI, forget what folk go on about printing, in digital renders you never need to mess with this, leave it at 72 DPI. For print, the rule of thumb is, you need 300 pixels for each inch of high quality printed image. You can always enlarge a large render to a bigger size in Photoshop etc, provided it's of large enough initial size to prevent "pixelization", for print use. My renders at 1680x1050 can print up to 30" x 20" and most lay folk won't see the difference.
8. You generally don't need texture antialising except in Animations, where turning that on and having it about 33% helps. So turn it off unless needed.
9. In the Anti-Aliasing options, Systematic provides very high quality but is extremely slow, so turn it off unless you find it's needed. Set Subrays per pixels ot minimum of 1 and maximum of 8, with "regular sub pizel sampling" turned on. This gives plenty of rays to get quality, some renders htough you may need to increase that to 6 and 24. Quality threshold 90%
10. Additonally, please note an important issue I raised in another tutorial! If you are using several glass or similar transparent materials (including water in transparent containers), you must edit the "Trace Reflections Trace Transparency Tab"!
    this is because it sets a limit on the number of ray traces through transparent materials, so, if too few, several sheets of glass in front of each otehr will look odd, but a single sheet should look jsut fine. So, normally, you don't need to edit this.

Note: render times are kinda of slow anyway because the scene this is taken from, is inside a massive volumetric material object enclosing much of the scene, which severely slows things down, which is which I chose it for testing! ;)
I'm also using it, because the almost vertical wooden plank texture causes bad anti-alias problems, look at the "jaggies" near the mast on the left of the first pics.

This scene has a Standard Atmosphere, with Standard Light rig, Soft shadows on Sun (2 degrees). No haze or fog at all (a peculiar outer space setting). Render size 1680 x 1050. Those of course impact render settings.

Paula Sanders worked away on similar tests for her own renders and found other interesting tweaks and info :)

http://www.perpetualvisions.com/new-articles/render-settings/renders.html

Note that she found that if you use texture antialiasing, keep it as 75% or so, because render times lengthen when it's used at lower settings! You'd expect the opposite, but hey, life, or art, is rarely so simple, eh? ;)

Thanks to Paula for her work! :)

I hope you find this of use! :)

All original art, writing on this site, copyright of Steven James, "Silverblade the Enchanter" ©2012