Introduction

3ds Max renders are pretty high quality, by default. In many cases, this is slowing you down because you don't need high quality when taking test renders to check your lighting or modeling progress. These seven steps will guide you through how to set up 3ds Max to optimize render times without compromising too much quality. While these tips will save you a little time in the short run, they'll save you hours as you speed up your workflow!

With seven techniques in all, I had to break this into two videos. In the first one, we'll look at the first four tricks: render size, render area, lighting quality, and sampling quality. In the second video, there are three more tricks to learn: polygon counts, pre-computed lighting, and material substitution.

Be sure to drop by my homepage sometime where you'll find the rest of my "Monday Movies”, as well as tons of 3ds Max tutorials, resources, and downloads.