Tony, just to elaborate on one thing mentioned earlier briefly, Vue's time remaining estimate is based on the assumption that the entire rest of the scene is as complicated as the line it's working on at that moment, and as a result is horribly inaccurate, my guess is that once it hit the water it really slowed down (do to transparency, bump and reflection calculation) and your estimate skyrocketed. But once the renderer actually passes the water it should speed up quite a bit and when it hits the sky it will just fly through that part completely.

Another thing, as was mentioned before, if you are using Global Illumination or Global Ambiance, go ahead and reduce the quality to -1.0 or even -1.5, especially for these large outdoor scenes you won't even notice the impact.

Beyond that there's not much else I can tell from your scene that you coud reduce, ecoystems do take some added time to render (not nearly as much as if you actually had all those trees manually placed in there) and it looks like you're using procedural terrains as well which also add a little bit of time.

Definately render in superior (or user equivelent settings) at minimum though for published work, broadcast does not do sufficient work on anti-aliasing and render quality.

Hope this helps some! Oh, one more thing, try disabling soft shadows if they're on, that is a big render hog and it doesn't look like this scene will look much different without them.

Message edited on: 08/11/2005 11:47