Simple project of rocket ship model
blender 2.74
cycles
Sorry for the late reply, got a little busy.
The way I did that scene is very simple, I turn off all the view port particles, so there won’t be any lag and only render a section with border in low sample to test what it will looks like. I use CPU render, so it might be a little slow but if memory is problem then GPU might not be a way to go tho.
here is the tutorial that I got the inspiration from :
http://henri-hebeisen.com/article14/abstract-landscape