With careful planning and controlled use of glass refractive settings and any reflective surface settings (hint: only mirrors are 100% reflective), low use of volume textures with quality sliders set as low as you can and still get the effect you want, and leaving volumetric world turned off, I use premium rendering at 64, soft shadows on, with resolutions as high as 1024 without renders taking much more than 6 hrs, most less than 2 hrs. It's really all in the planning stage. Check out my gallery here: the creation of the objects and scene may take me weeks or even months (I tend to tire of one project and move to another and return to the first project later, to stay fresh), but the renders are pretty fast. I hate to tie up my machine for too long, because it cuts into my time in the Forum. :^) Tjohn

This is not my "second childhood". I'm not finished with the first one yet.

Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.

"I'd like to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather....not screaming in terror like the passengers on his bus." - Jack Handy