Excellent results Frank, a nice improvement on the great past work that you and others have done. I have a thought: with no terrain in this shot, it might be an excellent candidate to test the experimental "Raytrace Everything" mode. Try turning it on, then set cloud detail to 1 only (even if you felt you needed higher samples for the original render), use conservative atmosphere samples (no more than 64, even if you used higher originally), and then set AA to 4 or so and let it go. See if you get higher/equivalent quality in less time than with the default renderer. My experience is you can often get less noise this way, and in similar render time...
But note to all: it is *rare* that Raytrace Everything is actually "better" for rendering speed or quality, since it handles terrain very poorly. So we still advise strongly against its use unless you really know what you're doing.
- Oshyan
