Managing Cycles Materials - Blender 2.6 Cycles: Materials and Textures - page 47

The Acceleration structure set to Static BVH and the Use Spatial Splits and
Cache BVH options are useful to reduce the calculation time for the bounding
volume hierarchy of the mesh that Cycles has to calculate every time it starts a ren-
dering. Anyway, this is useful only if the mesh doesn't get any modification between
renderings.
There's more...
The layout and the settings we just saved as default are what we are going to see at
first from now on every time we start Blender.
But maybe we don't want to have a Cycles material interface every time to start with,
and we prefer to have it as an option to be used only if there is the need.
Here is a simple way to do this:
1. Start Blender with the factory settings ( File | Load Factory Setting ) and
look at the top of the screen, in the main header on the side of the
Blender Render button: there are two more buttons labeled Default and
Scene .
2. By clicking on the Default button we can set a different interface layout
(there are already nine, each one studied for a different task, and their
names are perfectly explicative); clicking on Scene shows just the current
scene.
3. By clicking on the + icon on the side of the Default button, add a new
screen layout, and rename it Materials .
4. Then click on the + icon on the side of the Scene button and, by choosing
Full Copy , add a new scene to the file and rename it something like
Cycles_Materials . This new scene is a full copy of the default one, coex-
isting but independent.
At this point we can start with all the instructions already seen in the How to do it...
section of this recipe, that is switching to Cycles Render , splitting the 3D window,
subdividing the cube, and so on.
When done, just click on the screens button and switch back to Default , then save
the user preferences ( Ctrl + U ). Now our material creation interface is saved as a
screen option in a different scene; every time we need to access it, we simply select
the layout Materials from the screens button.