This is NOT about asking how to speed up cycles renders. I am just confused to why a scene has taken so long to render.
Here we go:
I have a camera (WOW) looking up into treetops. Pretty simple. These leaves have subsurface scattering with a black/white texture to apply some change in the colour/subsurface. The trees are a bunch of vertices with a skin modifier, textured. Some simple volumetric clouds. I have a weak volumetrics box to apply a light beam effect surrounding my camera reaching to just above the trees.
For the render settings, I used CPU (I know, kill me. But I started one on GPU and got different results and was just as slow!). Rendered at 4,096 samples at 2,800 x 1,800 (W x H).
I was rendering on a single iMac, which in the past, has done more complex scenes with higher settings within 6 hours easy.
Now for the render time:
99 hours and 52 minutes.
NEARLY 100 HOURS!!! Is it me or is that WAY too long!?!
I would upload the image but it is over 2mb :(
Any reasons into why it is taking so long would be grateful.