1. Yes... Bake to Polygons and select a low amount of polygons.

Save before doing it because sometimes you can get odd results. You may have to save each figure as individual .vob objects, open them one at a time in a new scene, reduce their geometry, save them and reimport them into your main scene using 'replace by'.

2. Depends what you use for your material.

If they are bitmaps, edit the bitmaps in photoshop and reduce their size. Or better... with figures that far off in the background, you can replace them by procedural materials with the same color tones. nobody will see the difference.

3. Multipass rendering

Add a check mark to each object mask or layer mask you want to render. Leave out the rest, including the sky. That way you will have characters rendered with the correct light but no sky.

• agiel - www.linfa.net