rendering faster

today i setup 64 2x4 area photometric lights with shadow samples of 2, they were all instanced. for fun, i turned on material over ride and put in a standard arch&design material. to my amazement it rendered in less than a minute. no GI of any type. so i turned off the material override and it took 3 mins to render. i turned off shadows on the area lights and it rendered in about 1 min. so then i rendered with material override on and created a shadow pass and that took less than a minute.

is it common practice to render with an override material and create a shadow pass to help speed up overall rendering? then render a "beauty pass" with shadows turned off?

in post processing, i noticed the shadow pass darkened the reflections of metal objects in the scene and overalll i had to reduce the opacity of the shadow layer.

is it common practice to render with an override material and create a shadow pass to help speed up overall rendering? then render a "beauty pass" with shadows turned off?

Not for me it isn't.

For me it's a good solution if you work on an animation scene, that you have to render many frames...

i ended up using light fall off, minimal shadow samples and built in AO with the arch&design materials. it turned out OK but i think more realism could be achieved with better materials.