Maxwell Render

How do I speed up render times in Maxwell?
I created a simple scene in Max to let me play around with the balance between exterior & interior lights - just some walls, floor, ceiling with holes for can lights, & circular planes in the holes for emitters.
I put a white basic maxwell material (roughness 100) on all surfaces. I put one of the emitters that came with Maxwell (hmi 200w.mxm). Since I have 80 lights I boosted the luminance watts to 64000. I rendered at 640x480. After 11 minutes I got the linked image. Pretty lame, huh?
Any tips for ways to improve my rendering times/image quality? Was this running so slow because I've got so many can lights? If that's the case, how do I handle renderings with a lot of light sources. Thanks for any input.

http://www.divshare.com/download/5852385-c2d

There are MANY factors that can slow down renderings. What caught my eye was that you said you have circular emitters. Use only rectangles or triangles for emitters. Also, hardware is a big factor in rendering with Maxwell. What kind of cpu and ram do you have? I recommend nothing less than a quad core cpu and plenty of ram. Any less than that, and you will be waiting a while for clean renders. Check out Benchwell.com to see the statistics.

_________________
Brian Looney
Maxwell + RealFlow
http://lunatic-studio.com/
Help! I'm dispersing into a haze of probability!

thanks Brian. I'll re-render with triangular emitters & see what improvement that gives.
As for my specs, I've got an HP xw8400 with a Xeon 2.66 (I think it's dual core), 8 gb of ram. It's pretty zippy when I'm working in Mental Ray. I get the impression that Maxwell is kinda waiting for computer hardware technology to catch up with its capabilities.

Ok, good luck. If you have any more questions, feel free to ask away. Most people are helpful and friendly here...

_________________
Brian Looney
Maxwell + RealFlow
http://lunatic-studio.com/
Help! I'm dispersing into a haze of probability!