(Cycles) Only render visible objects?

Hello! I’m working on a huge scene (a Minecraft world) and have huge render times for such a simple lighting setup (and the occasional memory crash). Would it be possible to only render what is visible from the camera? Because of the way my scene is set up, manually making objects invisible would be extremely hard or not work at all. Is there a plugin (or a setting) that would allow me to only render visible geometry?

Even if there was, surely that would make your render look really strange when the camera moves? The lighting would change constantly, shadows, light bounces and everything would distort it like crazy :smiley:

you can cut up the scene and put them on individual layers. animate the camera, and then render the animation untill you reach the point where the edge of the camera reaches the edge of the world. at that point, swich layer and start rendering again.

save as image, and put the images togheter to get the movie animation.

also, if you imported the minecraft world, i would guess you have all the blocks witch is under the surface, delete all of that, as it wont shop up in the render, ever.

if you have a LOT of objects, try to join as many as posible together.

The world was automatically hollowed out on export, but it’s still super big. Each type of block is its own object (e.g. all the grass is one object, all the stone is one object, etc). I could try using layers, but that would be a lot of manual labor. This is what my scene looks like.