Quote - Thank you Laurie. BTW, there are many ways of accelerating the render and many ways of saving time by having a much simpler workflow that uses real lights.

Case in point, take a look at this post by FSMCDesign, the Dino scene took 18 minutes from start to finish:

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2849428&page=56

 

 

The setup took 18 minutes. The render took 7 hours.

Which may be fine in some circumstances, but less so than others. For instance, I'm doing a comic series now and if it takes a few hours to set up the scene properly, that's fine as long as I can crank out a finished render (at the quality I need) in a few minutes so I can do several renders in an hour which is the production level that I absolutely need to make my schedule.

So there's really not a one size fits all answer.