My experience is that HQ renders take a long time to cook. Vue does not give you free render nodes if you wanted to distribute rendering to other computers. Vray does allow you to render on up to 10 machines for no extra cost. I guess it depends on how much of work is landscape related. If you are mainly rendering interior and exterior architecture, my personal advice is that Vray is the best plugin for this.

also see that your displacement image to not be inverted (negative) or if the software have this feature. Also, see if displacing direction in material is not negative(maxwell render accepts this feature).

yes nice work. i assume the coffee table is flat - but then why would it reflect the windows and screen as if quite convex? also generally the image is a little dull (colour not content!) but i always have this problem when i render so i don't know the answer. and something about the design - it seems funny to go to all that effort to get a nice clean, simple room, and then leave the black boxes cluttering up the shelf. i know it's a style thing, but i'd either arrange them carefully or put them in one nice piece. i like the style tho. especially colour of sofa and relationship to garden.

Managed to get it working..for some reason selecting Draw/Sandbox/From Scratch from the drop down menu doesnt work, but selecting it from the Toolbar does..strange but works great now.

No problem Sam. Welcome to SCF! Kerkythea is a good choice. Very powerful and if you get to grips with it you'll find other render apps much more forgiving. I never invested enough time with it. But I've got it's new commercial brother Thea and it's incredible. Anyway, enjoy what we've on offer around here and don't forget to thanks all those generous plugin guys for there efforts.