while reading the ambient occlusion experiment thread on p.b.i, I noticed 
the following sentence:

"I think what's missing is the number of rays that must be shot in AO vs.
radiosity. It's true that tracing AO sample rays is going to be cheaper
than tracing radiosity sample rays, as you say, although by how much is
scene and shader dependent."

which suddenly gave me an idea to possibly speed up radiosity quite a lot 
without losing too much quality: introduce a "quality_decrease" paramater. 
The idea is as follows: let's say you render your scene at highest quality 
(q11 I believe?), quality_decrease is set to 6 and recursion_limit is set to 
2.  Every sample with recursion 1 will then use the textures that would be 
used when rendering at q5 (simplified pigment, but full lighting), samples 
with recursion 2 will use textures that correspond with q4 (q4 is the limit, 
since lower quality settings provide too little information (no shadows)).

That way, by carefully selecting quick_color's, you can use very complex 
textures with only a decrease in speed while tracing for direct 
illumination.

Knowing myself, I probably overlooked a vital problem though...

cu!
-- 
#macro G(b,e)b+(e-b)*C/50#end#macro _(b,e,k,l)#local C=0;#while(C<50)
sphere{G(b,e)+3*z.1pigment{rgb G(k,l)}finish{ambient 1}}#local C=C+1;
#end#end _(y-x,y,x,x+y)_(y,-x-y,x+y,y)_(-x-y,-y,y,y+z)_(-y,y,y+z,x+y)
_(0x+y.5+y/2x)_(0x-y.5+y/2x)            // ZK http://www.povplace.com

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