How to Speed Up Your Rending Time in Cinema 4D

Cinema 4D is a powerful 3D application for creating computer generated images. With Cinema 4D you can create both still images and animations; however, before you can view your beautiful creations, you must render them. Rendering can take an unbearably long amount of time depending on the complexity of your scene and the speed and power of your computer. Generally speaking, the higher quality at which you render your images, the longer the rending process takes. Such high quality is not always necessary, though, especially when you are not producing a final render. You can adjust parameters in the "render settings" to speed up your rendering times tremendously.

Step 1.

Open a C4D project or just open C4D. Click on "render settings" under the render drop-down. The "render settings" parameters window will open.

Step 2.

The first you'll want to do is uncheck any items in the left column that are huge memory hogs - global illumination, ambient occlusion, and so on… It will serve you well to play around with these tools and understand what they do so you know when you really need them and when you don't.

Step 3.

Click on "options" under "multi pass." You'll see three fields in a row: "ray depth," "reflection depth" and "shadow depth." By default, these are set to: 15, 5, 15, respectively. Lowering these values will greatly speed up your rendering times without messing up the quality too much. How low you want to take them is up to; I like mine at: 8, 4, 8.

Step 4.

Click on "anti aliasing." By default, this will probably be set to "geometry" or "none." "None" is typically fine for preview renders and "geometry" can make do sometimes for still images, especially those for the web, but a lot of the time you're going to want to set it to "best." When you need to set it to best, say, for a final render, there's not much you can do hear; if you want it faster, you need more RAM or a better processor. But if you just need to get an idea of what your final scene will look like, just set it to "geometry." If you just need to watch how an animation plays out and you're not concerned with materials and contours, just set it to "none."