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.
Yeah most likely those files have been optimized for test renders. Rendering is a balancing game, quality over time or time over quality. Usually you're trying to struck some middle ground. The most common way is just to play with the noise threshold and samples, if you want to boil it down to one setting. But each scene is different, there isn't a global standard number to set, you have to be the judge depending on what you're working on and what price are you willing to pay.
Make sure you are set to use GPU and not CPU. Also reduce the number of samples or newer blender versions have a noise threshold setting and a max time setting. Another thing is denoising which allows you to use even less samples, but it's a balancing act. Blurry vs noise.
