Mental Ray Batch Render very slow

[Anonymous]

I am wondering why my batch render is going very slow. What is it that makes it go faster? My animation is 3000 frames. People say that's a lot, but I am using the 24 frames per second film setting, so it is only 2 minutes long. I really need help because I am looking at a month of rendering time if I do it every night when I go to bed. I use Maya 2015. My scene is made up of low quality polygons and textures, 2 models, the default ocean shader, and a ramp shader. I batch render by right clicking my project and selecting "render". Nothing else is running at the time and my CPU is using 100%.  I was looking for assistance with render setting optimization, and possibly hardware reccomendations. Though I get the impression my cpu isn't that bad to be rendering this slow. I don't know anything about where to begin on the road to faster batch rendering, please help! 

Here are my render settings:

Image format: Maya IFF (iff)

Image size: HD 1080, 1920x1080

Resolution: 72

Render Mode: Normal

Secondary Effects: Global Illumination, Caustics, Final Gathering, Ambient Occulsion.

Shadows: Yes

Motion Blur: Full

Sampling Mode: Unified Sampling

-Quality: 2.00

-Min Samples: 1

-Max Samples: 250

Raytracing: Everything Maxed

And everything else is left as default, including secondary effects.

Hardware:

Processor: AMD FX-6300 Six Core 3.5GHz

[_sebastian_f]

can you show some images? maybe that helps troubleshooting.

there is no render quick button but to be honest your settings read like you found the best way to slow everything down. there is usually no purpose to just set everything to the maximum. if you don´t know what the different settings are for or have a good reason to max out i.e. the raytrace settings start from the defaults and increase slowly until you find a balance between speed and quality.

[Anonymous]

This may not help at all, but how big is your scene scale compared to the grid? Maya uses an arbitrary scale, but I've noticed that if your scene is extremely large compared to the grid, if you select everything in your scene, group it, and scale it down proportionately, sometimes it can help with rendertime. Be aware this may have an effect on animation or textures, so make sure you save as a new interation before attempting this. 

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Also, motion blur is going to really bog down your render settings. When I need motion blur, I will usually render using layers, and put my objects/characters/etc, on their own render layer, and then add it in post.

[Anonymous]

Yeah my render time seems fine without motion blur, and my scene scale is 170 in comparison with the graph so it is pretty big. Thank you for your help!