When a render begins, rays are first sent out from our camera into the scene to gather information about the geometry that will be visible in the final image. If you already know the underlying concepts and just want the technical step-by-step procedure, you can skip right to it.

And finally I'll provide a step-by-step procedure to optimize any scene to render with an ideal balance of quality and speed. Then we'll learn how to identify the different sources of noise a scene can have. Then we'll go over an example scene to demonstrate exactly how a render can be optimized to be faster and cleaner. We'll first cover some of the underlying concepts behind how rendering and V-Ray's sampling works. But with a bit of understanding of how V-Ray works under the hood, you can achieve a higher quality result WITH faster render times - in some extreme cases ranging between 3x faster to 13x faster than the universal settings. Many times you'll see artists adopt the 'Universal V-Ray Settings' of having the Image Sampler (Anti-Aliasing, or AA) Max Subdivs value set very high (like 50 or 100), and then simply lowering the noise threshold value until the render becomes clean enough - thinking that it's the best / fastest that V-Ray can do.

There's often a lot of confusion surrounding the topic of V-Ray's sampling and what 'ideal' settings are. This tutorial attempts to cover and clarify the process of optimizing your V-Ray render settings to get the best possible render quality and fastest render time for a given scene.

3DS Max Render Settings Vray3.6