What has most effect on AA times?

[keeejreeej]

As i'm testing Kray i notice considerable differences in AA times. Some scenes render AA very fast and some (even lower res) render AA much slower. If I'm rendering 2pass method animations, AA still takes very long on second pass, so it determines render time. What makes AA slow/fast, so I can speed up total render time? Texture size, bump, glass, reflection, refraction, material layering, light types, specific kray settings?
And what is best method of having good material but reasonable render times. As I am used to render only stills it's hard to find the best settings. I guess I could, in many cases, 'downgrade' my materials pretty much...

[silverlw]

Lot's of finalgather rays causes AA to slow down alot. If you can spread out the samples with min/max distance, lower the values to a minimum, and uncheck FG rays for reflective/refractive materials you should gain speedups.

[silverlw]

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showpost.ph ... count=1677

Here is a uggly scene rendered in MR wich took 9 hours to complete. It's not because MR is bad but particular scenes with particular settings can drastically increase rendertimes. Experience and unerstanding of how different settings affect eachothers is crucial so i just wanted to show this as a bad example.

[keeejreeej]

Thanks, that helped a lot. Among some other settings I'm getting quite faster render times already...