a.) Baking was under 5min.

b.) Started render somewhere around 4 in the morning, and it finished sometime around 2 in the afternoon. Default animation times were left alone, so 250 frames total.

Of course that's on CPU using Cycles at about 20 samples. Not to mention I was using one core less than my total (3 cores rendering out of 4 in my case) so I can hop on the computer and do other things while it's rendering in the background without lag. Using a 32 bit build on WinXP and CPU is AMD PhenomII 940 X4. Depending on what you have, YMMV. If you have a better setup or CUDA graphics card, you might be able to cut the time down significantly.

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Barbequed Pixels?

Your friendly neighborhood Wings3D nut.
Also feel free to browse my freebies at ShareCG.
There might be something worth downloading.