Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=411036&Start=1&Sectionid=2&filter_genre_id=0&WhatsNe

I've finally finished my 'Ocean Replenished' piece and I wanted to thank all of you who gave advice. I took advice from several months ago when I started working on this and the more recent and I think it all made it a better picture. I wound up using a very slight DOF of .01 which I think gave it just the right touch. http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=411036&Start=1&Sectionid=2&filter_genre_id=0&WhatsNew=Yes

Nice, must have taken a while to render with all that transparency/reflection. Nice subtle DOF. I almost always use it set at .01-.03 also. Keep up the good work! AS

Actually, it reported it at just over 4.5 hours. I was really surprised. :o)

Cool Image, would make a nice poster.

Susan, I'll check the image for sure during my daily stroll into the galleries... but I want to use your consideration about rendertimes to repeat here my strange finding and see if someone is experiencing the same thing. I continue to get strange results in rendertimes. To put it shortly, the times are pretty much the same if I use normal AA or Premium at 36rpp (sometimes even 64 get the same render time). That's __ I think __ because the last AA pass in Normal is a real bugger. I usually thank the Brycegod for the always unexpected gift, but I'm really puzzled by this... Sorry for the off-thread steer... S.

Stefano, I haven't found any rhyme or reason about render times yet. When I did this one with .04 DOF, it took about 8.5 hours. As I cut down the DOF, the render got faster which makes sense to me. But I did an identical render of this without DOF just to compare and it took over 8 hours. My challenge entry this month has volumetric clouds in it and it only took a couple of hours to render. I started playing with volumetric clouds in this picture (same materials, similar sizes and such) and it immediately moved the render time (with only one sphere group also) to 'forever.' I finally stopped the render at 10 hours and it was about half done. I dunno...just one of the mysteries of the God Bryce. :o)

I think religion is the issue here, Susan :) Right now I'm rendering a lighting nut-case (225 spotlights), and the tests were giving me the same estimate with Premium 36rpp and Normal (counting about 30%-50% additional time for the last AA pass). Then I added Blurry Reflections on top of Soft Shadows and this increased the time a little bit, but not so much. So, why use Normal when I get almost the same RTimes increasing quality? But this is strange... :) S.