I posted this question before but deleted it because I ran into another problem regarding mental ray and how it saves final gather maps. First, my original question was, is there a setting in the render panel that would force max to render FGM's without rendering the scene itself? I don't mean simply hiding the frame buffer, as the scene would still render in the background. What I'm looking for is an option similar to toggling the visibility flag on all objects, or simply ignoring output altogether. If not, I can fall back to the visibility flag. Second, is there a way to tell mental ray that I want to save FGM data for each frame in the animation, instead of recalculating it each time? Because, right now, mr will use data from the first frame, and then it will re-process final gather for each subsequent frame. I would think there has to be a way to cache FGM data for multiple frames, but it's not readily apparent. And if there isn't, that means I have to save an FGM for every single frame using an opaque ground plane, and then render the scene in a second pass with a matte/shadow ground plane to achieve the results I want. And then I would have to do that thousands of times, once for each frame of animation in my project. Which is absurd. So, any help at all in this matter is greatly appreciated.