Andrew, my scene will have more stuff in it... Your image lookg good, but I don't see the kind of shadows lurking in the corners natural bounce that I am looking for...

Stanley, I know that people have fooled Carrara into doing good quality lighting in less time, so I am hoping to see if anyone has good at least some optimization ideas. Maybe there is a setting somewhere which is not strictly needed and can be skipped without much quality drop, but with speed improvement. For example, turning "light through transparency" off really does shave off a lot of render time, so if a scene can be set up without it, it works marvelously. There is also "Full Raytracing", which gives some quality improvement, but it is so insignificant that it's practically never worth the render speed price. So I am looking for other options I can save render time on.

Kixum here is getting pretty awesome results, so I'd like to know how long it takes and what the settings are.