When I open tutorial files from CG-cookie, they usually render pretty fast with looking reasonably photorealistic-like.
But when I try to set up the lighting on my own to test building a simple wax material, even when I set the max number of bounces to 1, the scene is very choppy and slower to load than other files I’ve downloaded.
What are some common ways to speed up the Cycles render engine? Unfortunately I can’t upload my .blend file to this site.