[Brian Jones]

can you post the scene file?

[Brian Jones]

Are the new pieces still objects in a Boole or are they made editable? – if they are editable did you Connect the resulting objects? If you did Connect (or Connect and Delete) did you select all the vertexes and run Optimize so all the objects are one piece?

[Brian Jones]

add a compositing tag to the Physical Sky object and uncheck Seen By Camera in the tag

[Brian Jones]

put a pure alpha texture on the ship (all channels off except Alpha, Alpha with color texture black)
then – Render Settings/Sketch and Toon/Shading – Background – Off, Object – Off

[Brian Jones]

Functions and Structure menu’s are where you would find stuff in the Mesh menu in later versions (mostly), assuming they are indicating something that is in 11.5

[Brian Jones]

the Help has a good description check that out. People seem to do spheres when doing water but the best thing is a poly object reduced to a single vertex.
With objects it puts a sphere around every vertex so if you want a ‘soft’ box you need to have lots of vertexes in the box or you just have a few spheres in a box shape or one sphere (depending on the settings).
Splines are much more powerful in a metaball than you usually see used (but maybe I’m just not looking in the right places). Once again the help has some good example pics.

[Brian Jones]

without knowing a lot more about the settings (probably the scene file) it looks like having the light leaks from the prefilter samples being too large when using a Light Map but that’s probably not the only possibility

[Brian Jones]

in 17 it works like you’d want, in 16 you’d have to move the original pieces off the screen – where the pieces and the cloner relative to each other are doesn’t make a difference (your light targets will have to change to the cloner though)

[Brian Jones]

make a suggestion to Maxon support, they just have not thought of it – if people wanted to render notes etc you use a text spline extruded (or a MoText) They did give the Annotation object xpresso ports so you could pass the text from the annotation to a text spline or MoText – yeah not as sweet as direct rendering would be

[Brian Jones]

rule number one – it doesn’t matter how much power you have you can always cripple your computer with the right settings, particularly in the textures.

You have AO system wide and it’s not likely doing anything to your water (but it’s trying to and you have a lot of polys there) Turn the system-wide AO off and use AO only in the silicon texture in the Diffusion channel.

The Transparency in the silicon doesn’t make any sense to me as silicon (at least the white silicon you are going for) isn’t transparent, I would disable it – it does have SSS but not transparency, in any case blurriness can be very expensive in render time.

I don’t know about your water’s thickness but Im guessing the the blurriness there in the Transparency isn’t doing you any good, the blurriness in the Reflectance/Default Reflection (called Roughness probably) is the only thing I’m seeing in your renders so it’s the only blurriness I would keep.

Try turning Blurriness off in the Render Settings/Options for a test render and see what that does to your render time.