I have a project that I am trying to render that is mostly composed of a “back painted” glass material.  Does anyone have any tips that will speed up the very slow rendering time that I am experiencing right now.  I am using mental ray with a stand alone unit (no group rendering)

Ryan, it would help to know a little more about your rendering.  I’m sure we can help, but we’ll need some of the details first.

1. You’re using mental ray.  Are you using Final Gather and/or Global Illumination? What are the settings?

2. What do you have for lights, and how many?

3. What are you using for your materials, and how are they set up?

It may be easiest to zip and post your file here, so we can take a look.  Also, you may want to post an image of what you have so far.

3DS Max Design 2011 64-bit - Advantage Pack
Dell Precision T5500, Dual Six Core Xeon X5650 @ 2.67GHz, nVidia Quadro 5000, 24 GB RAM, Win 7 Enterprise 64-bit
Minneapolis, MN, USA

Thanks Chris.  I have attached what I have so far.  It is pretty basic but it is taking a long time to render and now I am having the speckling on the walls.
Mental Ray - Yes
8 lights - Photometric free cylinder
Global Illumination = Mulitplier 1
Max # Phrotons / sample: 500
Final Gather - Draft - Multiplier 1

Major materials:
Stainless Steel - A&D Template - unchanged
Glass - A&D Template (Physical)- unchanged

	Attachment
bow1.bmp

Here is the file.  Any help with anything that looks out of the norm would be much appreciated.

	Attachment
bow_tower.zip

Using solid shape area Lights with raytraced shadows is always going to be slow, using 8 of them like that is going to be even slower. You could get similar illumination from a single rectangular area light and use cylinders with self illumination for the tubes.
For the glass, the physical glass preset is good for pysically corect glass objects, but unnsecassary for thin, flat paines of glass, you can get away with using thin geom glass for that. It’s much faster because it saves you having to calculate refractions and filtering at depth. You only need physical glass for thick, solid or curved glass objects.

Samab - I have reduced the number of lights to one and changed the glass to Thin from physical.  It did help but the rendering times are still slow.
I have attached the updated file.