"Another thing you can do with shadows, instead of using the Soft Shadows" I suppose you meant to say, instead of using Soft shadows, use multiple lights spaced very closely together, right? As I posted recently, I read that one soft-shadowed radial light raises rendering time 16 times. Sixteen. Said by a guy who worked on Bryce 5 at Corel. So, create one radial light, duplicate it, move the duplicate a tiny little bit to one side. Repeeat, move to another side, and so on. Don't overdo that, cause the calculation of all those shadows can also take a lot of time.

-- erlik