The following list will help you optimize your scene’s materials. Keep in mind that speed optimizations usually sacrifice quality while quality optimizations usually decrease speed. It’s not always easy to have your cake and eat it too when it comes to rendering!
To have your material/surface shaders render more quickly, check each scene object for any active but unnecessary surface shader parameters and deactivate them.
Open each object’s property editor by selecting the object and choosing Modify > Shader from the Render toolbar and disable any parameters that you don’t want to use. For example, if objects in your scene have no transparency or reflection, turn those parameters off.
An alternative to deactivating various parameters is to use the Simple shaders of each material, such as the Simple Lambert, Simple Phong, etc., available from the Render toolbar (Get > Material).
Keep in mind that these surface shaders cannot create transparencies, reflections, or photon effects.
Raytraced reflections can take a long time to render because you usually have to increase the ray depth setting for the raytracing rendering algorithm.
To save time for reflections, you can apply a reflection map without raytracing to simulate reflectivity. For more information about reflection maps, see Creating a Reflection/Environment Map [ Texturing ].
Autodesk Softimage v.7.5