how would you go about making an ambient occlusion pass with the camera inside a cube? I am doing an interior rendering of a room without any windows and my attempts at AO passes have been black. I could cut a whole in the wall behind the camera to let the environment light in but was curious if there was another way to pull this off.

Good to know. I haven't made it as far as importing previously created proxies. Should I expect similar times bringing them in or is this a more streamlined operation?

It could very well be a lack of patience issue. I haven't let it run for longer than 10 min. It's just frustrating having close to 90% of my processor sitting idle while I wait for an hour to make one proxy. After making a few proxies I would have already reached the point of diminishing returns on my time.

I don't have 2.0 loaded now. I had installed the demo to play around with the new bells and whistles, but i had to go back to 1.4 to finish up some client projects. 2.0 dongle is on its way though.

Is anyone else having issues creating higher poly proxies? I'm trying to create a proxy of a 22k face tree from 3d warehouse and every time i try to export the proxy, sketchup freezes up and my processor gets stuck at 13%. I realize that sketchup is not able to utilize multi threaded processors, but it defeats the purpose of proxies if it can't handle hi poly more gracefully than this. Just curious if anyone else is having this issue.

windows 7 pro
I7 Processor
8 Gig memory
Dell Keyboard