Blender Foundations the microscope, killing off ray tracing, SSS, and shadows can give you immense speed ups. There is one last bag of tricks that doesn't involve the render settings. Because of this, they are a little more of a pain to implement, but can be worth it, especially when working with animation testing. The Subsurface and Particle modifiers can both significantly increase the complexity of a scene's geometry. Unfortunately, there is no global setting to disable these features. By selecting each object in ques- tion and disabling the Render button in the appropriate modifier like Figure 12.7, you can eliminate these from the pipeline and gain some speed. Figure 12.7 Disabling rendering on the Particle and Subsurface modifiers, everything else turned back on; time: 3:57. Finally, Figure 12.8 shows what happens when you use all of these strategies together, rendering at 100% of original size. At 25% size with the same quality optimizations, the render time drops to 0:05! Re-enabling anti-aliasing and adding back the particle hair bumps the time up to 0:23, and the result is much more useful. Granted, it's not useful for Figure 12.8 Everything at once; time: 1:09. much, but it's a good demonstration of how far you can strip things down if you need to. When things are this far away from how the final render will really look, you might be better off using the 3D view in Textured mode with GLSL enabled. It only supports buffered shadows and a subset of the texturing options, but it might look better. Finding the Sweet Spot for Final Renders When it comes to final renders, you need what you need. If you've used subsurface scattering with some- one's skin, you can't very well turn it off and expect your results to be any good. Beyond that, there is not a whole lot you can do. The techniques shown earlier in this book for modeling, lighting, and surfac- ing should already have your scene optimized to a large degree. For actual render settings, do a few tests. Render with anti-aliasing set to both 5 and 16. Compare the results. Can you notice a difference? Is the difference you see worth the difference in render times, multiplied by 336