Thank's a lot for all the nice comments here.
I#ll try to answer a few questions as good as I can.
@Tom: Thanks for adding, these, must have missed them.
@simmsimaging: Thank you very much, it is the greatest compliment to know to have inspired other fellow artist.
@sms: No magic, just carefull sceneplanning and a couple'o minutes rendering. In the times of beta I tried to avoid glossy materials wherever possible, no glass in the windows etc. The rendertimes with beta for a 640*480 image to become noisefree have been around 10-15h I think. But then again I was rendering on an old athlon with 2.6 GHz. I also used a lot of Neatimage to further reduce noise.
@michaelmarcondes: Speaking in hours I'd say around 20-40 maybe spread around a week or two. As I decline premade models (evermotion etc) for my personal and showcase works, the modeling comsumes the most of it naturally.
As far as the rendering goes, I am fortunate to have access to our renderfarm at work which renders pretty much everything clean in a night or two (real heavy scenes). A 640* 480 image I did with the beta would be ready within the lunch break.
The farm consists of 10 Dell poweredge blades ,all quadcores 3GHz along with 8 quadcore workstations. Makes the difference I suppose, although I had to strip down a few scenes becomes it brought everything to it's knees renderingwise.
@macray: See above.
It's really hard to tell in hours since it depends on so many factors, but to give an idea, my recenct scenes @around 3k resolution would render around a week or two on an average Dualcore machine. I had quite a few images cooking for 100 hours+ when I used to render everything at home on my poor computer. I mostly render until SP level 22-24 now at work and use everything maxwell offers so I believe many scene could be speed up a lot. Nighttimes multilight scenes with many reflective caustics as I tend to have are exceptionally hard to get clean, the same scene with just skydome lighting could well be ready in 24- 48 hours as you guessed (on a single machine @3k resolution).
@carstenquilitz: Yeah, they are pretty heavy. 3ds max filesize is often above 150 MB (record here is 270 MB), scenes containing around 1.5- 2 million polys. MXI size record is @2.6 GB. Now with 1.5 my biggest MXI was still 2GB but consider that the resolution was 10000*80000 px. I remember the fun I had mergin' 14 MXI's @2.6 GB each...
@x_site: thanks man, theres no secret ( o.k maybe one or two) just hard work.
- By Andreas Hopf