Dr Easton's rule 1

In general as you go down the materials editor your render times will increase. What does this mean in terms of rendering speed? Well, for example the reflection portion of a material's texture is more expensive to render than the diffusion portion.

For this test I used a variation of the reflective sphere picture. I placed 21 sphere randomly all within the field of view of the camera, Figure 2.

I then set each property to 100% one at a time. Then rendered and recorded the time. When the bump height was set to 100% is used the blue bump material.

This shows that the trend more or less holds true. It may seem that the a difference between 15 and 30 dosen't seem a lot. But remember that 30 is twice 15. This could add up if you have a very large file or are rendering an animation.

Table 1 Effect of each property on render time.
Property	sec. (+/- 1)
no property	15
Diffusion	16
Ambience	15
Specularity	17
Metallicity	16
Bump height	21
Transparency	30
Reflection	28

Figure 1

Figure 2

I took the test a little further and render diffusion and transparency separately at 50%. The diffusion number stayed around 16-15 sec. The transparency number drop to around 24-23 sec.

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