Quote - Welcome to the forum, Marc.

Thank you sir. It is an honour and a pleasure to be here.

Quote - Now, the quality of the preview renderer isn't really comparable to Firefly. You won't get good lights, reflection, refraction or reasonable shaders. I would use Firefly for the final render for any real animation, although I would make sure that the render settings are as low as possible, for the quality I want to archive.

I agree entirely. I'm coming from video editing (well, actually, in real life I'm a working musician, but that's another story...), and I'm used to working with a preview that is good enough to get the job done, with the quality coming in the final render, so I'm not complaining about the preview quality at all.

Quote - If time is really an issue, I would try not to use ray tracing. This would mean no IDL and no AO, no real reflections too (but reflection maps are possible), so lighting a scene can be problematic, but you will have very short render times with a much higher quality than with the preview renderer. If you are interested, here is a nice presentation from Pixar in which they explain the use of Ray Tracing in the "Cars" movie - Pixar did not use Ray Tracing in earlier movies. Movies have long render times, if you want quality. If possible, use a couple of computers for rendering, all pro versions can do that.

Hey, first of all, thank you so much for the link. I love stuff like that, and I need it, because I have so much to learn!

I have already learnt to judge on a scene by scene basis if I need raytracing or not. A few test renders will usually sort things out. Unfortunately, for the look I am going for (and, by golly, I have a long way to go to get there!), for most scenes, I need raytracing.

Oh, and well done to 96 for the win against Bayern!

My compliments...