One of the things I’m working on is reducing render times. I’m using an out-of-the-box solution for render settings and lighting, because to be honest I’m not really interested in fiddling with that stuff. I basically want to make a scene, set the poses and the camera, and go.

Faster rendering almost always means lower quality, but at the resolution I work in a lot of the really top-end quality ends up not being visible. Maybe if I were working in 4k or something it would be an issue, but at 1280×720 it just doesn’t show up. Here is a render that I stopped at 23 minutes, at 98.24% convergence (convergence basically = quality from what I can tell).

Here is the exact same scene, but I set the render to complete at 80% convergence. It finished in just over 4 minutes.

I can’t see any difference, personally. Just to check, I put both of them in layers in Photoshop and set the top layer’s blending mode to Difference (basically it blacks out every pixel that is identical to the pixel below it). So all of the black parts are identical in each image.

Yes, I think I’m going to stick to 80%! Maybe even less, like 60-70%. We will see.