achieving better renders but without massive time penalties
This is more of a information sharing post than a question (though I do have one at the end). I managed a significant upgrade in baking out my ambient occlusion in 3DS Max 2010 by increasing my "samples per pixel" under the sampling quality panel of the renderer setup palette to 64-256 (min-max) and changing the sampling quality filter type to "gauss" (from box). This was great, but it came at a huge time penalty - the rendering time went from about 1 minute to about 15 on a 3-core processor (I had samples set to 256).
Aside from using an external program like xNormal, is there a better way to achieve similar improvements that don't take forever?
Aside from using an external program like xNormal, is there a better way to achieve similar improvements that don't take forever?
