Mazak, I'm using a slightly different model than you, but I'm using basic Final settings. Of course the radiosity pre-render is what kills things as far as rendertimes go.

In Vue7 there's a few new features with regard to Radiosity. The first is 'shadow smoothing.'

Shadow smoothness is a GI effect and only available when in GI or Radiosity mode. The old renderer created 'splotchy' renders, even with settings tuned. In order to get rid of the splotchies, without maxing out the photon settings (and rendertimes), the new renderer performs some sort of (gaussian) blur on the GI shadows, which creates much better renders, at the expense of a bit lighter effect. Kind of like what happens when you take a black square in a white field and apply a gaussian blur to it-- the overall image gets lighter. I'm assuming this is now controlled by the 'smoothness' setting. Too much smoothness and you kill the overall contrast in the shadow areas, too little and you're back to the splotchies.

Also now you can have "NEGATIVE" ambient. Using negative ambient settings, you can control the overall darkness of the shadow areas, and with the smoothness control you can control the contrast within the darknes.

I'm not at the computer which rendered these, but I seem to remember a Quality Boost setting of 0 in the Atmosphere Editor. No longer do you really have to max out the numbers to get the rendering quality.

Also, it appears there is a new relationship between things like the Global Radiosity Gain and the Sky Dome Gain. And whether or not you have a ground plane can affect the rendering substantially.

HTH, Chipp