Re: Your Workflow?

The question you have to ask yourself when interacting with your scene is "Do I really need to see all 1 million+ verts together at one time?" Usually the answer is no. I tend to go through my scene and set up display layers that let me quickly and easily turn large chunks of geometry on and off when I'm working in an area that doesn't require me to see everything. We go through great lengths to set up our pipeline and workflow so that shots are broken up into pieces that are manageable. You only need to see x, y and z for animation. Layout and camera work needs to see a,b,c and standin versions of x, y, z. Etc.

I don't think you need 64 bit architechture to get around a million+ vertex scene. It can help, but it wont process much faster, and will use more memory actually.

As for rendering sometimes you just have to wait the wait. Yes you can, and probably should break your scene into render layers. If something changes hopefully the whole frame doesn't need to be rerendered. You only have to rerender the characters, their shadows and possibly any bounce they inflict on the scene. But usually the environment affects the lighting of the characters, and the characters rarely influence the lighting of the environment, unless they're holding lightsources in some way.

Layers are the way to reduce overhead in any pipeline