Quote - BTW, none of these renders were more than 500 samples. I'm going to save those efforts when I actually have a shader I really want to show off. I wish I could take credit for this one:

clickable image - 3.7 meg

The shader is by this fellow on the BlenderArtists.org forum named Killbee: I've been studying it. It is sheer genius. Indeed, Blender is sheer genius. There simply are no limits even as it stands now, and yet they continue making it better! Next up: SSS!!!

 

Most of my renders in Cycles are from 200 - 300 samples . however on an intence scene like my fisrt post i had it at 6000 samples.  I know of ways to reduce it but was to lazy to setup render layers and all that