Acadia, and actually anyone else that cares to try it out... After your last render issue, I made some changes to a Python script I had been writing. What it does is tell you everything in your scene, and the options set for each. It gives details on lights and what sort of options are set for them. Also, figure parts in the scene. A bunch of other tidbits of info. Near the top of the script are instructions. You can change the value of some of the variables in the script to control your output. Basically, the script began as a way to render in a first pass with just shadows, then once with no shadows. I figured by doing this, I could save some time by just taking the 2 images and manually compositing in Photoshop. It doesn't particularly speed up the total render time, but it does seem to suck up less memory, I figure since it isn't painting so much with each render from the bucket. Speaking of which, though it does make it harder to cancel a render in progress, I have had quite a bit of success with a bucket size of 64. I know a lot of people are dropping to 32, but my system seems to prefer using the larger bucket. Anyway, if anyone wants to try out this script, I am welcome to feedback. You may notice that there are some notes about a "Pro" version. I am going to make it a better script, and I have done some research to make some big improvements. (Especially if my threading idea works out, but we will see.) Hope this helps! (P.S. You have to change the file extension from txt to py for it to work. The forum doesn't allow .py files to be posted.)