I'll be honest, our little motto in our animation studio for team 103, is all about "cheating." It doesn't have to be right, it has to look good! In our 2006 animation we made the mistake of having each of those buildings be about 750,000 faces, and when you have about 15 huge skyscrapers like that, it just kills the computers! RAM was in great demand last year. This year, with the help of a dual xeon quadcore computer with 3 gigs of RAM, we didn't have much trouble. We used all sorts of particle systems, lighting effects (daylight is really good in 3dsmax9), and we had better strategies for creating big scenes, such as the powerplant/city scene. As usual, we used mental ray to render due to the great quality and different effects you can utilize with it. Every year we run into issues, but the next year those issues are not a problem because we know how to solve them. The biggest issue this year was probably our unreliable server! It hosts about 1.5 terrabytes of data, but takes pleasure in shutting down for no reason. Everytime it happened, I had every team member at my "terminal" yelling at me to fix it because I'm the IT guy for the team. But besides that, we were very efficient this year. All of those tips posted are great tips and are all pretty much true. Good luck to teams next year, if anyone ever needs help, although I'll be in college, I'm hoping to mentor team 103, but if not, I'm always available for help or questions. Just drop me an email and I'll be more than happy to give you a hand.
vadyr56@gmail.com