is it possible to see how many samples where reached if you set a fixed time for your render, say 3 hours for example?
Yes. In KS7 you"ll that on the bottom left corner in the render window
unless you let it render overnight and the render window disappears after some minutes :) that would be a nice feature to plop into the metadata sidecar file that can be written when rendering psd files. I'll have a looky and see if its in there.
Unfortunately the metadata sidecar file doesn't report how many samples it got to, but that would be a cool thing to know.
Here is the data it does provide, which could be useful in other areas. My goal is to use this file to work a workflow into a spreadsheet or something more user friendly to populate our assets database with more data. But sadly this doesn't work with NR. Yet :)
KeyShot 7 meta data file for a rendered still image of "untitled.69.psd"
Using interactive camera settings from KeyShot
Perspective camera
Camera distance = 4.27695
Camera inclination = 15
Camera azimuth = 45
Camera lookat = <0 2 0>
Scene assembly structure including materials
Group "Default" {
Group "Cylinder" {
Part "pCylinder1" with material "Anodized Brushed Black Chromate"
}
}