Before you start spending thousands of dollars on 3ds plus a render farm, you may want to try optimizing your render times in P5 first. Increasing the bucket size, as Little_Dragon mentioned, is one starting point. Another would be avoiding ray tracing whenever possible - reflection can be done just as well with environment maps (see the fish tank in "Finding Nemo" - no raytracing). Lower resolution models also render much faster, you can produce details with bump or displacement maps. And don't use excessively large textures - no need for a 4096x4096 texture on a background character that'll take only 10% of a NTSC animation frame. Objects in motion are very forgiving anyway - a lot of details that look not quite perfect in a still image are not being noticed at all in animation.

Message edited on: 06/17/2004 07:24