yes am having problems when i best render a picture it takes soooooooo much time to get the picture renderd i even tryed to make the document small 400/400 and placed a sphere it took me 30 minutes to best render it 
in the old z brush best renderd it would have takin a split second,any idea to help me go faster.thanks
You should check to see what the setting is under Lights->Shadows->Rays. I usually don’t have that set any higher than 10, and I get sharp renders…A 2500 X 1500 render with a high end job takes me 16 minutes or so, and I have a P2 400 Xeon chipset…
thank sc,but i did that and also used one light with no shadows ,or rays but the same thing happens ,and what is gif shadowing?
Can’t help you with Gif…
And I have no idea why it would possibly take that long to render…Sorry I couldn’t help.
What are your anti-aliasing settings? If they are at a level of ‘4’ that will greatly increase your render time. To save render time, make your document much larger than you normally would, and render it with a anti-aliasing setting of ‘2’ then you can resize your document down to a smaller size, therefore reducing the jagged edges around your models. Try it and see.
Also, be selective with how many rays you select under shadowing. The less rays you have on, the less the render time. However your shadows will appear grainer than if you use a higher ray count. When doing a final render (for example the ZORK series which uses Global Illumination), I set the rays on 500.
I found that with the rays on 500 and any anti-aliasing at all, the render took far too long.
Instead I made my document quite a large size, then shrinked it down after the render. Due to the shrinking down. The pixols also shrink, reducing the amount of jagged edges which appear.
MJ
it’s probley your Ram
This is a document done at 1280 x 960, rendered with rays at 10, Shadow aperture at 120, and it took 10 minutes and 8 seconds to render…
StoneCutter, I’ve found that when rendering using global illumination on the floor (such as in Zork) using a lower amount of rays produces a grainy shadow. It may be different from casting a shadow on the wall. When I finish the zscript im making i’ll do a few test renders and post result.
BTW: Killer figure you’ve got there, you should definately do somthing with that!
MJ
If you alter the Shadow Aperture MJ, you can control that without all of the extra Ray Tracing… 
oooh really? Great, thanks for the info StoneCutter, I’ll have to give it a try. Now I won’t have to wait an hour between test renders
MJ
Hey MJ, my advice would be to set the rays to 10, then change each atribute in the panel, one at a time, and render to see the effect of each change…Using this methodical approach might take a little time, but it will show you the whole deal in one shot, and save time in the future, when you have to decide what particular lighting and shadow effect you might want for a particular image… 
Great advice as usual Stonecutter, I just hope my progress as a digital artist reflects accurately how large the impact of yours and others advice really is. I think i’ll just play around with your suggestions with the render and lighting palette tonight and learn as much as I can.
MJ