Yeah this was never about a problem or final result. I had hoped that was clear.
For me, including the day prior, I usually get the Path Tracing effect, all the weird red yellow and greenish colours. Only when using standard renderer did I get the old school black effect, but it wasn't interweaved like this, just hard black pixels.
Quote from: Oshyan... except that lower AA seems to make it appear more "transparent" for lack of a better word
This may have something to do with it. I have been previewing at pretty high AA and resolution for the most part. This scene however has warping of clouds and a lot of density manipulation, which, like Denis's nebulas, gets painfully slow, so I lowered both resolution and AA. In fact AA was at an odd factor of 3.5.