Very cool Mike. :D You've got a lot of stuff going on there. For animation, usually things with that much depth are actually separate renders later composed in editing. It speeds up renders and allows custom render settings based on content. (it also makes edits less painful) The haze layer and ground bump are the time killers with GI on this. If there is any way you can mod this, then life will be good. For animation, I try to keep render times 3 minutes or less per frame and cheat however I need to to make it happen. ** This is for the attached image above. Model maps are usually rendered with "fake" AO included so you don't have to go the time expense during render. A custom map is usually located in what is the Highlight channel in Carrara with the same map being added or multiplied to the texture channel. The above image is the AO/highligt for some spaceship details. DCG's Anything Goos is also a great tool for this - and it's procedural. For animations, bump is wasted processor usage for anything that is not close to the camera plus it can make things visually muddy during render. People are watching motion not detail. Eliminating the bump on the ground and modifying the texture maps to fake bumps will dramatically decrease render time and make usage of AO faster. --- So - back to cleaning up your render. If changing the maps is not a good use of time right now it's time to experiement. It will be a balancing act between photon count, interpolation and the setting "Improved Edges" for best quality to speed. A combination of reduced photons, increasing the interpolation and enabling the Improved edges will provide the best time-to-quality ratio. There isn't a magic bullet for this problem. :-/ BTW, I recently saw a statistic about who leases the largest blocks of time from the Department of Defense Super Computers - Pixar. :) Animation is the reason render farms were created. Mark