Rendering Performance and Quality

A render is not finished when the “max samples” of the “Quality” bar are reached. It is finished when the Viewport image quality is free of noise and all details have been rendered to a fine level. For some simple scenes, this will be after 500 samples. For some complex scenes it may take 10,000 samples.

Tips to increase render speed (by increasing sample/sec or reducing the samples required to finish the render):
Use the “Direct Light” kernel. This may provide a lower quality output but is much faster than “Path Tracing” and “PMC”. Only use this option if the reduction in render quality is acceptable.
Minimise the use of SSS materials
Increase “Caustic Blur” in “Kernel” tab when using “Path Tracing”. This smooths out the noise in the render
Use a higher-powered graphics card, or add additional graphics cards to your system
If the light illuminating the scene has come through a specular (glass) material, using “PMC” rather than “Path Tracing”. Also, you can let more direct light through the glass by reducing the glass material’s opacity (from 1 to say 0.2).
If illuminating the scene by emitters, make sure those emitters have as few polygons as possible. Make sure that polygons are as tiny as possible when applying an emitter material, then convert them to a Component (Group) and stretch the group to get a very big emitter. If you use large polygons you won’t get any emission due to SketchUp units scale. Use transformation matrices of a groups with tiny polygons in them instead.

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