To clarify what Frank said, your *2nd* image is very demanding and would require high(er) settings to get good quality and eliminate the noise. The first image, with your quoted detail settings of extremely high samples, is almost certainly using an unnecessary amount of samples both for clouds and atmosphere. The important point here is not all scenes are like in their need for detail settings, particularly cloud and atmosphere samples. Any dark scene, with "dramatic" lighting, is likely to need more samples, particularly in the atmosphere. "God rays" and heavy cloud shadows will again require more atmosphere samples. Clouds will require more samples in such situations as well, though it's the atmosphere that usually suffers most. But again in the scene first posted in this thread, the settings are probably overkill. I would try Quality 1.5 or so in the clouds, and atmospheric samples of perhaps 64.
- Oshyan
