Quote from: Oshyan on January 05, 2017, 05:39:34 PM
Yes, I am quite liking where it has come to. The lesson in all this, though, Bobby - and it's one you should really take to heart - is that there are usually reasons for extremely long renders, and they are often solvable. In many cases it simply doesn't make good sense to wait 10s of hours for a long render when you could cancel it early (seeing that progress is very slow after only a few hours) and resolve the problem. It is best to assume by default that if it *seems* slow (i.e. you make comments like "this new machine is not much faster than my old!"), then in fact something *is* wrong, and it probably can be fixed. So cancel the render and do some investigation.
I'm glad you were able to find a way to speed things up and come out with a great render in the end. 
- Oshyan
Thanks Oshyan...I still see things I'll change later, but happy enough for now. I await Hannes pronouncement, heh heh heh.
I agree on the lesson but at this stage I'm still pushing this box and thought it was the intense AA and detail settings.
The lesson I learned though is before rendering go through all the nodes and make sure you don't have competing water clips loaded...I've adjusted my workflow in that direction