Quote - In case you are curious how crazy I am, I rendered a 15,000 pixel wide version of the "building the ftl1" image I made and it took just a little over 4 days.

However, I'm going to have it printed 5 feet wide and I'm going to hang it in my office and a lot of people are going to see it in a very big way.  That four days of render time will pay off.

That image was very much worth it, so I wouldn't call you crazy at all.

But in my case I simply cannot afford such render times, just becuase I need my computer during the day to do my work. Unless I can time it to coinside with an away-without-computer vacation, it's not really an option :). So, it's pretty much a once-a-year kind of deal... At most I can leave it to render overnight, but that means I need to keep my renders under 12 hours for the absolute maximum render time.

In this case I am fine with the final render taking those 12 hours, it is a very complex scene, but I need to keep it under this limit, which means that I need to build this project economizing on the render time as much as possible from the very beginning, making sure that any components I add will not slow me down too much. So now I am going to look into the model to try and figure out where the render-slow complexity is coming from.