If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend six sharpening my axe. — Abraham Lincoln
This link from nukepedia got me started thinking about smart ways to work and render. I guess the old ‘sharpen your axe’ adage applies here. Time spent making a script more efficient will almost always pay off in the end. I think that Scott Chambers nailed a lot of really good ideas in his post, but I’m all for continuing the conversation. These are a lot more entry level, but I think we have all fallen for most of them before.
Clamp values whenever needed. It is pretty easy to accidentally end up with values that are way outside of the 0-1 range. That can cause some more difficult calculations and is generally just a headache unless you are doing this intentionally. Clamp them in-node or with a clamp node to keep them nice and regular.
Delete unused channels. Cg just passed a 45 channel file to you. If you don’t need any of those layers, then cut them free. It takes clock cycles to process even the channels that you can’t see.
Crop to format. If you aren’t careful then your bounding box can end up way bigger than need be. Pay careful attention to that dotted line and it will reward you with faster renders.
Watch your RAM. Nuke loves RAM, so much so that it may be a little jealous of all of the other apps on your computer. Keep and eye on your process viewer and keep the number of instances of nuke/rv/whatever down to a minimum. Also check your useage whenever you have one of those facepalm moments where nothing is responding. More than likely you are running in swap.
Prerender/Precomp whenever possible. Keep the number of times that you need to render out that particle sim / heavy gizmo / oflow node to a minimum. Bake it out and bring it back in.
Turn overlay off. When viewing it in nuke, overlay adds a processor load. Turn it off.
Region of interest. Cut down your render area to get faster feedback.
Render out fewer frames. Render every 5th frame by adding a /5 to the end of your frame range.
And sadly, buy faster hardware. Nuke wants as much power as you can throw at it. Get more RAM, a SSD, an accelerator card, video card, faster network, or a faster processor. This is an easily justifiable expense when your time equals money.