Rendering Still Takes A Long Time

I did these two as my last tasks for this new job. They hit all of us with pink slips at the end of the shift today. Oh well, I was looking for a job when I found this one.

These were done with the sky turned on which I found slows my renderings to a crawl. The close in shot of the stair landing took over 2-1/2 hours to complete. And I gotta work on getting that galvanized steel to not look so shiny.

Now with time on my hands I will hopefully learn how to add windows, trees and beautiful woman in a bkini waiting for me at the top of these stairs which will soon adorn an industrial property here in Miami.

Bill,

Sorry to hear about the pink slip thing - good luck. The renderings look good.

Regarding the 2 1/2 hours for rendering the close up did you set a crop window? I'm know things have changed since r14 but there should be a way to set up your render to ignore everything outside of the area you are zoomed into.

Is all of that modeled? If so, that's a big reason for the long render time. All of those criss-crossing pieces of geometry are going to force the engine to work overtime to calculate the light bounces, reflections, etc. and process the information. I think I mentioned before that you should use opacity maps whenever possible to help ease the burden on the engine. For example, you could replace all of that wire meshing with texture maps and no one would ever know the difference. And I'm sure your render time would drop significantly.