Render-times

While test rendering these scenes, it seemed an opportune moment to experiment with Arnold's render settings. Initial renders were running at 46 minutes/frame at 720p which was clearly unacceptable.

46 minutes - All lights, high settings

Through a combination of reducing the use of lighting and incremental changes to sampling and ray depth values, acceptable images could be produced in a little over 6 minutes.

13 minutes - Lights removed from cells

12 minutes - Sampling settings reduced, cell lights converted to simple points

11 minutes - Adaptive sampling employed

7 minutes - Specular ray depth reduced to zero

6 minutes - Fine adjustment of settings

While this process was worth exploring, the scene is still in development and render times are likely to increase. With this in mind, it may become necessary to bake light maps from static light sources to simplify the scene.