Cycles and Render times?

I am experimenting with Cycles in Blender 2.7.3, and noticing a dramatic rise in render times. Now, the quality is great but is that other’s experience as well? Significantly higher render times? My hardware is too old for me to use my GPU for rendering…

Any way to improve Cycles’ render times?

thanks for any clues.

Tuning cycles is kinda scenario based and is somewhat of an art lol. Do you mind sharing what your scene looks like?

2 glass bottles, same material, 1 “floor” object, 1 plane turned into a light. 64 render samples. 50% of 2400 x 2400 image size.

thanks!

Cycles is pretty slow when there is a floor object , cause all the light bounces off and goes back into the glass and eventually reflects making it bounce again back onto the floor. When working with a “floor” you can decrease the amount of maximum light bounces from 8 to 4 or 6. It should increase the render times but may loose the realism

Thank you for that information. I guess all I can say about cycles is…“wow.” Very expensive renderer. The results are nice, but I got faster and better results on far lesser hardware with Lightwave, just LW’s normal renderer.

When I hear that having a “floor” object sends render times to the moon, makes me think that Cycles is appropriate only for very special situations. Am I reading things wrong?

Cycles is meant as a general purpose tool. It’s not supposed to render fast per se, though. It’s meant to be simple to set up. Material nodes are easily “snapped together”, there’s no photons or light caches to mess with, no AO distance (unless you want it), no bounce lights to place, etc. Lighting “just works”.

It might take longer to render, but render time is cheaper than artist time, and scales a lot better (much easier to buy more hardware than add people to the project).

OK…that’s a very helpful perspective…I guess the smart workflow is hit F12 before you hit the sack and not expect great renders While-U-Wait…