Attached Link: http://www.bauhaussoftware.com/

Everything these guys said is good stuff. I'm going to make the assumption that you really want to make a movie, and put it out on DVD. (Which is what I'm working on slowly but surely) Here are some of my tips: Test your motion by making animatics. You can do this by making rendering your movie with DISPLAY settings instead of render settings, even with 2d motion blur checked this will be done in a few minutes VS a few hours for your final render. I usually do animatics as an uncompressed AVI (compression adds "render" time.) But always do finals as image files. Bite the bullet and buy some compositing software. It will be expensive but it will save you time, and free you up creatively. I use Bauhaus Mirage (See the attached link). Never heard of it? That's ok nobody has. It used to be called Aura and was put out by Newtek. What can you do once you get this software? You can render scene elements to seperate Layers, and adjust them, apply photoshop style filters etc...) One of my favorite tricks is faking animated Depth of field in this way. It also has a built in particle system so you can quite easily add special effects like fire, explosions, etc... to your scenes. I've personally used the particles to do snow and breath vapor on a cold day. :D Another compositing trick I use a lot is this: Say you have a long establishing shot, and you just want the camera to pan over the scene for a few seconds. You could render hundreds of frames in Poser or Vue... taking HOURS AND HOURS. Or you could render one Oversized Frame (say 2000x2000) and Pan across that. :D Or if you start the frame at say 70% size, and animate bringing it up to 100% You can zoom into the frame as well! You can rotate or do whatever... it's really like approaching 3d as if it were 2d animation. In traditional 2d animation Backgrounds are static paintings that are panned over with the camera. OK enough about Mirage. (I'm very enthusiastic about that software :D) I'll post more later. This post is ludicrously long as it is.