Rendering Time & Processing Power

[moak]

Michael,
18 hours is a very long time. Many things affect rendering time - number of lights, complexity of model, computer hardware, rendering quality settings.
Scott's quip refers to a thread where he posted some images rendered very quickly - times under one minute if I remember. Do the search and compare the renderings to what you're producing. I recently did the rendering below. There are a bunch of lights and pretty high image quality settings. It took about 2 hours.