What are your preferred GI engines?

[analogueWay]

In the few months that I have been using V-Ray, I have been doing primarily animation work. For this, I usually use Irradiance Mapping set to "Medium-Animation" for the primary and Quasi-Monte Carlo with default settings for the secondary.

I haven't had much time to experiment with settings, so it is nice that V-Ray comes with defaults that work well for animation and give me rock-solid results with good render times.

With some still rendering work on the horizon, I have spent some time today looking at the various merits and shortcomings of the GI engines for still rendering. And, I am curious to know what some of you (who are much more experienced with V-Ray that I) currently prefer for your GI engines and what settings you tend to default to.

Thanks
-Jeremy

[unknown]

just finished two really big projects, done with IR maps and QMC secondary and also light cache secondary on some shots. But I found it a bit flakey. IR and QMC is tried and tested approach.
And just to throw a spanner in the works I rendered an AO pass for everything.

edit:
one other thing I did in a bid to get down rendertimes. Was really optimise, reduce bitmap sizes, remove low blur values on non important objects, and also a good trick is use nearest sample look up for reconstructing ur IR maps. ITs a real time saver, and if your only rendering PAL then u will never notice the tiny loss of quality.