> media

Oh, *that's* where those shadows are from. I don't think your media sampling
parameters are high enough; the shadow shouldn't look like bars.

Be sure to have two light sources: one in a light_group with the media, as a
point light. The other in a light group with the rest of the scene, as an
area light. This avoids doing area light sampling on the media which causes
huge unnecessary slowdowns. (Area light sampling is still done for the
shadow tests which pass through scattering media; this can be avoided by
giving the media no_shadow, but that may also change the appearance of the
media so weigh your options.)

> antialiasing method 2, depth 3,  threshold 0.01

Turn your threshold up. Make it at *least* 0.1. Preferably as high as 0.2.
Get it as high as you can without aliasing artifacts showing up. Right now
you're doing antialiasing in probably almost every pixel of the scene - even
in those huge, nearly solid colored areas where you'd never notice the
difference.

> a 4x4 area light.

Make it 5x5 and add "adaptive 1" to it. Then you'll do 3x3 sampling in
probably 99% of the scene, and 5x5 sampling only where necessary.

You might even try "adaptive 0" to get only 2x2 sampling in most of the
scene (and more only when necessary), but the one shadow I see is fairly
blurry so that may cause artifacts.

With some tweaking, I think this scene could be made to render in a matter
of a few hours.

 - Slime
 [ http://www.slimeland.com/ ]

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