You could turn your render settings down or turn some hires objects off.

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whoops, double post.

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[Link to www.3dprevis.com]

You could try working with layers. If you're doing an interior you could have your room in one layer and all the furniture and stuff in another one and just hide the furniture layer when you want to check your light levels.

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[Link to www.3dprevis.com]

can i ask? what do mean work with layers??

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Started Max last September 2008

Jovanie_
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"To forgive a woman's lie is a man's duty!!"

See Tysons answer below

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[Link to www.3dprevis.com]

I usually find that showing the calculation phase of both the irradiance map and the lightcache gives a good impression of the overall lighting.
especially lightcache. you can tell in just a few seconds how much light is bouncing around. for previewing the final render you can use adaptive subdivision as your image sampler (anti-aliasing). if you set it to -2,-1 you can get very rough undersampled renders that are quick but still show you most of the important information you need to make adjustments.

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you can put all your max scene elements onto different layers in the layers pallet (button on the toolbar) which lets you hide, show and freeze all the stuff on a layer. its usefull when you have a big scene or if you want to quickly hide or freeze complicated selections of objects such as say all the bones in a rig or all the geometry in a character. Just be carefull when you use the layers because if you have a layer active and you create a new object it will be created in that layer. so if the layer is hidden or frozen the object will be hidden too. you need to remember to create new objects in the right layers or on the default base layer.

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Other than what has already been stated, I would suggest rendering a tiny thumbnail preview. I usually render at 320x for most of my render tests.

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I don't have anything to add, everything that came to my mind was already written, so ill just write a post because i haven't posted in a while and i really feel like typing

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The secret of creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
-Albert Einstein