So, is there anyway to render faster the transparent areas of a 3D animation? For example: my background is transparent and most of the image will be transparent, but for some reason Cycles takes minutes to render these transparent areas.
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There is a commercial add-on that animates the render border. Maybe that will help. https://blendermarket.com/products/animated-render-border/ – yann Jun 10 '17 at 20:06
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Branched path tracing is significantly faster on empty background areas since it limits initial samples and instead gathers multiple subsamples: What is branched path tracing and how is it useful?
Some effects such as depth of field or motion blur may need a lot of initial samples anyway though, so branched path may not always be faster. Additionally, it consumes quite a lot of extra memory when running on GPU, so it can easily put a scene over the edge of fitting in VRAM or not.