I thought I'd elaborate a touch, not that I would call any of my images
"spectacular". :-)

In most renders, the things that add the most to the rendering time are
lighting (area_lights, and especially radiosity),  anti-aliasing, and
special effects (focal blur and media). These are all things that you
can generally turn off while you're working.

So unless you're doing fancy isosurfaces or fractals, test renders
should take well under two minutes (under twenty seconds if you don't do
elaborate macros like I tend to).

Now, personally, I have a nasty habit of cranking up radiosity and
anti-aliasing even during my test renders. I let it render for half and
hour, come back and make a small change, and let it render again for
another half hour. Besides making me take forever to create anything,
the only real drawback is that half an hour is sometimes long enough for
me to forget what the heck I was doing. :-/

-- 
William Tracy
afi### [at] gmailcom -- wtr### [at] calpolyedu

You know you've been raytracing too long when you visit the eye doctor
and ask if he can increase your viewing resolution and turn on
anti-aliasing.
    -- Doug Eichenberg

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