"What are you doing with the all-white material render? Combining it with the full color render in Photoshop or something?" Yeah. Ambient Occlusion, as it's called, is a widely known technique in 3D animation, because it allows you to basically render a seperate "GI" pass much more quickly than you can do under normal circumstances, and gives you more control. You'd need Photoshop or, in the case of video, AfterEffects or Combustion to composite the results together. Basically, you start by rendering a scene with full textures on all the objects with NO shadows (which renders very quickly. Then, you'd remove all the texture nodes completely, and set all the objects to a plain white material with no specularity. This time you render it with a global light setup, with shadows on every light to get a GI effect (soft ambient shadows) going on. Since you aren't loading any high resolution textures or materials to the renderer, it renders much faster per frame. Finally, you bring the full color layer you rendered with no shadows, and the all-white occlusion layer with soft GI-like shadows into a post FX editor, and multiply the occlusion layer over the color layer. This basically makes it so only the shadow areas get composited on top of the color render. You can also render a seperate layer with just your key light. This also gives you a little more control over the final shadow/light/color elements of your scene when you touch things up in post, being that they will all be on seperate layers. As it is right now, doing this in P5 is too much of a hassle, because it means manually having to change all the materials on everything in the scene one by one. Not very efficient at all. "Isn't it tempting to wait for P6 on this one?" Yeah, I guess I'm going to have to wait on it. I posted this before I even knew P6 would have an ambient occlusion option built-in. Thanks anyway for responding.

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Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.