Hi All, and thanks for the compliments. These were ALOT of work to put together, but much fun. The spacey image did have a reflective shader on the rocks, which made them look incredible, but even @400x300, the render times were prohibitive at qualities any higher than 0.5.
Oshyan is going to kill me, but I really want to render them all at quality of 1.0. I know I can render them at 0.7 and most people won't notice, but I am a perfectionist when it comes to image making.
I did some tests at 640x480, and at 1.0, it took about 14-20 mins for 1% of the image (I rendered pieces in 1% verticle slices and assembled them in photoshop as a test). I only did about 7% of the image, but that small amount looked fantastic. Unfortunately, this was at 640x480. My "usual" minimum resolution is 1600x1200 when I created images before TG2.
Another test render I did was rendered at quality 0.5 @ 640x480 and it took about 6 hours to complete, but I could still see some grain and imperfections in the foliage.
I am going to test 0.7 and try to see how long it will take for 1024x768.
Other stats: I used a sample rate of 64 for the clouds and atmosphere, and GI of 2.0, though I'd love to go higher on this one day.