There are many ways for decreasing the render time of project, this tutorial will explain how I've textured, lit, rendered and composited my projects. This will be very useful for people who don't have powerful computers and also people that do.
I will be using and focusing on Maya for this tutorial, but I guess every 3D creation software has some kind of layer and attributes system.
About layers - part 1 :
Layer rendering is really useful, especially when you have many computers as you can assign different scenes to each one.
At the beginning of your project, assign a layer to every model or group of models in your scene. I've created a layer for a low-poly version as well as the high-poly version of the model, this is so I can turn off the low poly model and the high-poly models will remain visible. Also I've created a layer for the ground, and another one for the walls or other object in the scene.
About the Textures :
When I create textures, I try to work to a size of 1024x1024 files for full shots, medium shots and close ups. It's not necessary you do this, so you could also create 512x512 texture files, so depending on the shot, assign either one or the other texture file. Also, I tend to always save my textures out as targa files.
Transparency mapped materials and close ups will increase render time and combine this with ray-tracing and your computer will be very busy for a very long time.
About the Lights :
Animate your characters and then proceed to lighting your scene. Enter the Rendering mode in the menu.
By pressing the number 7 key, you will be able to see an illumination preview of you scene. This can help show you, more or less how your scene is illuminated, if you move a light you will see what is being illuminated by that light and how the illumination changes.
