Hi, Found this great online tool for balancing Image Sampler and DMC Sampler Render Settings:
http://www.cggallery.com/tutorials/dmc_calculator/
Perhaps someone else finds this useful too.
It helped me to get my render times down, and up the quality with settings that work and balance each other.
There seem to be so many techniques and approaches to this.
Some people put all their efforts into Image Sampler, others use Light Subdivs to clean things up and very few seem to use the DMC Sampler.
Using this tool helped me to see the link between them all and get faster render times whilst increasing visual quality. It allowed me to place samples where they are needed instead of just flooding the render with rays hoping for a good result.
It is often counter intuitive but increasing the number of DMC samples AND/OR Subdivs can also lower total render time because the scene is then less noisy and thus the AA Image Sampler has less to do.
I found this video very interesting too:
Michael VS
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