Hidden feature in Blender dramatically reduces render times

This is a great way to dramatically reduce your Blender render times. It's a "hidden" feature in Blender that allows you to reduce the complexity of the render calculations WITHOUT having to change your parameter settings.

The trick is to go to the Scene buttons window (F10) and locate the Anim panel.


Directly to the right of the Play button, you'll see a mysterious little control labeled "rt".


Changing the value of this control does several things (more info on that later in this article), but we're going to focus on the access it provides to Blender's Render Simplification panel.

To reveal the Render Simplification panel, set the "rt" value to 1.


You'll notice that a new panel appears next to the Render panel called, "Simplification".


Simply go to this panel, enable Render Simplification by clicking the option button with the same name.

Now, you can drastically reduce the effects of several time-consuming aspects of rendering your scene! The great part about this is that you can really turn down many of the parameters with minimal change to how your rendered scene appears! Yes, there are some differences but the render still functions very well as a pre-visualization for your final full render. This will dramatically increase your productivity by allowing you to render far more high-quality test renders within the same amount of time, allowing you to try more ideas and designs before dedicating yourself to a more time-consuming full render.

Experiment and have fun with this and it will really have a positive impact on your Blender workflow!


For more info on the other "hidden" features revealed by the "rt" control, go here.

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