The pretracing does preliminary passes on the scene to place and gather
radiosity sample for reuse. The idea is that when beginning with broad
sweeps, you begin with placing samples all around the image for starters,
and then, the more iterations (and also the more detailed the pretrace gets)
you do, the more samples are placed where needed. It's a refinement process.
As with all refinement processes, starting with highly detailed settings
right away doesn't harm, though I think it is better to have a few passes
for the radiosity algorithm to properly figure out where to place samples.

What I personally like about the pretrace is that you can get a good feel if
the lighting is right, cause you get a rough render very fast.

Regards,
Tim

-- 
"Tim Nikias v2.0"
Homepage: <http://www.nolights.de>

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