3Ds Max - Global Illumination

[Rhino]

Alright think I have my final here, basically set up 7 GI lights, 1 being a top down light which are very faint, then just used my fill as the main light and rendered these in 1min so hoping it will be good

[harefort]

If you want to use the Skylight+Lighttracer:
#1 Reduce the rays per sample. 100 is not that noisy and as soon as you combine the lightmap with the other textures, noise will become even less obvious.
#2 Reduce the lightmap size. Such soft gradients will not lose much quality when you use 128² instead of 512². Half-Life² uses 1 lightmap-sample per 16*16 texture-samples, if I'm not mistaken.
#3 Reduce Noise with Photoshop. Use Batch-Actions for processing many files.

Apart from that you might try using Mental Ray for ambient occlusion.
It's faster and you can better tweak it.
With 100 Samples in the Render To Texture options and Samples per Pixel set to min=1, max=4 in the render options, it's even faster than the skylight and looks less noisy.
With the Max Dist. value in the Render To Texture options you can reduce the shadow size and fake light-bouncing inside buildings.

Hope that helps.

edit: too late :P

[Rhino]

cheers for the help thou think I'm going to go with what I have setup above, just need to test it in the editor first to make sure its all good