Basically theres just a few things that really eat up loads of rendering time:

• Reflections (Water, glass, metals, liquids, etc) . Depending on the scene it might sometimes be possible to reduce the number of reflective materials used. Transparency also effects render times when the "turn reflective with angle" is used.

• Depth of Field: A true killer for rendering time. Not really much you can do about it, besides dropping the DOF and doing it in postwork

• Ecosystems: Ecosystems with thousands of plants can eat up loads of rendering time. its much less compared to working with individual plants, but large ecosystems can cost you much rendering time. Try making it smaller by covering parts with large plants /objects and deleting the covered part of the ecosystem. Also try lowering plant resolution for polgon count and texture resolution, especially for plants that are far away. Just scale the plants larger, re-populate and you will also have less plants to calculate.

• Atmosphere A spectral/Radiosity  atmosphere will render much longer then a Standard/Standard atmosphere.  I have made some standard atmospheres that  look quite good on many scenes and greatly reduce rendering times.

• Complexicity: If you have millions of polygons used for imported models, then try thinking about reducing their polygon resolution or just using fewer of these.

• Lights: Dont use scenes with like 100 point lights, these can also be a killer.

• Shadows: soft shadows with quality boost take up quite a bit of rendering time. You may want to try adjusting the quality bias if you dont have shadows in the foreground of the scene

• Rendering settings: Most errors are done here. Some users render their scenes in Superior/Ultra mode and boost up their rendering times. While this definitely looks a bit better just think of what you get. often you buy a handfull of Anti-Aliasing for hours or days of render time. Use a custom set-up and reduce all AA  related settings. You can often get much better effects within seconds when using external programs, i use GIMP and neat image, these can in most cases do in seconds what takes Vue ages. Yes that may be a bit cheating, but if the final result is the same or even better i think this might be worth a try.

theres many more little things you can tweak. If vue keeps your HDD busy during render, then physical memory is the bottle neck, try to refrain from rendering such scenes as they take like 10 times longer when you lack the ram.

Vue content creator
www.renderarmy.com