Cycles Users: Beware of Square Samples
Richard van der Oost writes:
There is a sneaky render setting in Blender that can increase your render time by 128x (or more) with a single click. It’s called “Square Samples” and if you’re not familiar with what this setting is doing, you might be in for a bad time!
Why was this setting added to Blender, and was it a good choice?
I may be wrong, but this might have come from requests from users who also use 3rd party renderers.
A lot of those work with squared numbers, and of course use much lower settings to get the same AA results.
It’s a bit of a dumb setting, it ‘should’ at least do the math on the current sampling value to its proper number when turning on square sampling. Or have some better explanation in the popup, warning you about this. ;)
Hi Rob, yeah you might be right about other render engines using the squared scale.
I think they should either use the squared scale, or linear, but not be able to switch to both. Just to keep things more concise / simple, and avoid people from suddenly exploding their render time / cost.
But yeah, I guess we can’t go back now, because there are users that like using it, and users that don’t want to use it..