Use single-sided instead of double-sided surfaces (which is the default) on the object’s
Attribute Editor. The biggest speed gain is for the Maya hardware renderer.
Tessellating large surfaces requires a lot of memory, so use several small surfaces instead of one large surface when you can. The renderer is more efficient with smaller surfaces.
For Maya software rendering and Maya hardware rendering, use bump mapping instead of displacement mapping.
For Maya software rendering, make bump maps flatter. To do this, reduce the value of the
Alpha Gain attribute, which smooths the bump map and reduces the number of samples of adaptive shading. This technique only works when
Edge Anti-aliasing
is set to
Highest Quality. The texture bump looks flatter when the
Alpha Gain is lower.
For Maya software rendering, turn on
Use Displacement Bounding Box when using displacement maps.
For Maya software rendering, use layered textures when possible, instead of a Layered Shader. (See
Layered Shaders and
2D and 3D textures for more information.)
For Maya software rendering and mental ray for Maya, if you are raytracing the scene, set the
Reflection Limit and
Refraction Limit to the lowest values that produce acceptable results.
For Maya software rendering, in the
Render Settings: Maya Software tab on Linux, Use File Cache avoids re-tessellation of the same surface during rendering. Turn on Use File Cache to store geometric data in a separate file in a location that you specify (the default location is
/usr/tmp, but you can set a new location by typing
setenv TMPDIR
xxx, where
xxx is the name of the directory where this file is output).