"so far the only problems ive had with P5 is when I start to render too many shadows from lights....the comp doesnt hang up or anything...it just takes a loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong time to complete the render....i tried a render with global illumination with all shadows cast.......after 5 hours of rendering i just canceled the render process.....the comp didnt hang up through all that! it was just slow..." Yep. That's the one reason people would look outside the app for rendering for sure. P5 is slow if you have a lot of lights, but this can be remedied a bit using probelight. That's like "baking" the GI on to the models through their materials. However, this in itself can be time consuming as well, and sometimes takes longer to figure out than just exporting it and rendering somewhere that has actual GI. I did a little render not too long ago. Faked GI using global illumination "lights" setup I found online (maybe runtimeDNA or somewhere). Took just over 6 hours to render. UGH. Dropped the same scene in 3dsMax, using Vray render system. 35 minutes with medium irradience map at 1600x1200. That's a BIG big difference in speed. Plus the Max one just looked better in the end. I love P5 though, and try to use it's Firefly as much as I possibly can. But when I absolutely want GI for a scene, it's off to Max I go (usually). ;)