Very interesting model. The metal effect is wonderful. Perhaps you get a hight render time because in the render setting you have a too hight value to the reflexion depth , is it?. Cheers.

looks nice, but 18hours is waayyyyy too long. You should be able to tune the settings (reflection depth especially) so it would take about 1hour I think

I'm just curious, but what was the HDRI image you used for illumination? I can't really tell... in this image, since you aren't seeing the background or the sky, what would the difference be if you just used a sky object with a slightly-luminous white material?

Well, concerning the render time - yes, the setting were unoptimised and the resulting time wasn't that weird. Doesn't matter, didn't use the computer much at the time. rgoer: if i used a white material, all the reflections would be white and wouldn't look as good as with the uficci probe.

Very nice indeed. I tend to both agree, and disagree with rgoer: I believe you could get a very similar result by turning GI off, and just using the reflections created by the probe. You should try it.

Woa, this looks very neat man! Was it for some sort of industrial assignment?

Sorry, but you could have rendered this image with one soft spot in well under 10 minutes... I assume you have used an environmental map for the reflections?

Ok, first of all, this isn't about render times at all, i was just bitching because i didn't expect, although i should have. This wasn't an industrial assignment, i was making it for my own enjoyment and yes, maybe i could have made it with a soft light but the effect would be altogether different since i used GI, without any environment maps.