My planet Earth render few weeks ago

[zzu]

Check it out, single frame took me 14 hours to render on my 6 core machine

[ajcgi]

Oooo well, pretty as that is, that's a long render time...
I find when working with clouds that the 'quality' slider will creep up above 1 while I'm not looking. Maybe check yours haven't gone crazy high on the quality settings. Another suggestion is to go through all your fractal nodes, turn off all displacement on nodes you don't need displacement on, and increase minimum size on anything that's really small. Eg a minimum scale of 0.01m is not going to be seen from space, so that can go much much higher.

[Kadri]

The thickness of the clouds do look a little too much.
Are there more then 2 cloud layers by the way?
Less thickness, less cloud layers especially intersecting ones mean faster render times too.
Reflection takes longer to render too of course.

[zzu]

The thickness of the clouds do look a little too much.
Are there more then 2 cloud layers by the way?
Less thickness, less cloud layers especially intersecting ones mean faster render times too.
Reflection takes longer to render too of course.

yep, there are like 5 clouds layers, haha. Guess long render time is inevitable, but I'll try to optimize it with lesser cloud thickness.

[DocCharly65]

May be in fact it needs a bit additional work and less cloud layers, but I like it already. Especially the shadows of the clouds on the ground! Great!