I've got another annoying render problem. Doing some test renders, I realized that it takes some time for mental ray to do calculations before the render actually starts. After some research, it appears that the calculation time is proportional to the distance the camera is from my geometry. I'm trying to get my camera in nice and close for a shot, but this results in a verrrry long pre-render time. It was well over five minutes on a 640x360 before I killed it and it hadn't even rendered a pixel yet.

With a bit more research I've come to the conclusion that this is because I'm using a SSS material. Does anyone know how to circumvent or alleviate this problem? Thanks.