I played around last night some more and I did notice that if you stick with no textures and just use material nodes that the shadow maps were rendering at about 1 second per shadow map. I was getting great results there. When I put in a texture map, of course the 10-20 second shadow map calc times came back. Pretty weighty rendering times await for really serious renderings. If you just do stills, then this is the best technique I've seen yet. Also ockham's delete lights Python script (I think it's ockham's anyway) really cuts down time in experimenting with the Lightgen plugin output. I found that setting total light output to .6 helped me get less bright renders. Note that these light sets appear to be much brighter than they are until you actually render them. Machineclaw thanks! I'm off to the websites as soon as I get home. Oh, I made up a trick for dealing with the error message in HDRI shop. As Paoli mentioned, it can be a guessing game for when the light set file is done. I broke down and browsed the file output to the desktop and moved the program window over a bit so I can see when its done. Lightgen makes two temp files on the desktop and then a lightset file when its done. As soon as you see the file there you can close out of HDRShop.