Greetings from the Bleeding Edge!

I import the base obj files into Maya. I do all my rigging and animation there - very time consuming to set all that up but very flexible as well. Renderman Pro Studio is my renderer. Once the SSS and GI calculations have been cached, rendering one 800x600 frame takes 45 seconds with raytracing enabled. I'm looking to render 130,000 frames, so anything longer than one minute is intolerable.