Reduce default number of Cycles samples from 4096 to something more reasonable
By default, Cycles is set to use 1024 samples in the viewport and 4096 when rendering. These numbers are very high, and new Blender users are often confused and disappointed at how slow Blender seems to be.
I leave it to smarter people to suggest better defaults, but can we all agree that 4096 is far too high?
5 Comments
Hello! I've added a proposal for a feature that lets you set your own default values , which would let you default to whatever you want😁 In fact I used this post as an example of exactly the kind of thing different users have different opinions on. Would be interested to hear what you think!
4096 is not too high lol
To add to the two earlier comments: the default settings also have adaptive sampling with quite high noise threshold. So not only these default sample counts become mere maximum ones, which are even more reasonable, but also most "beginner-grade" renders would have their sampling interrupted way before reaching the maximum, and renders that need more, well, usually really need it.
I think the defaults are fine. Blender ships with the requirement that a user dials in the appropriate rendering settings for their hardware. No denoising with 4k samples on CPU is fairly hardware-agnostic and makes for a good final render when the user hasn't attempted to change anything yet. Anything less might be noisy depending on the scene.
Someone familiar with 3D will know to change the samples, and someone new to 3D probably has a lot more immediately confusing things to grapple with.
I think the default settings are reasonable. It usually doesn't take that long (at least for my renders in my experience). The noise threshold stops the render far before the max samples limit is reached. On another note, yeah i sometimes decrease the samples because 50-100 are already sufficient enough with denoising.