Hey, Grimm... just a couple of suggestions:
1) Have EA provide you with a rendering machine or two that you can have handle rendering while you continue to work on the assets themselves.
2) That machine should have as much RAM as possible -- anyone who tells you that [X]gb of RAM is too much RAM has never rendered anything at all, or has been asleep while they rendered.
3) It should also have a high-speed quad-core processor at least. Graphics card doesn't matter at all for the actual rendering, so run it on whatever in that respect.
Way, way ahead of you.
Of course, these things are true regardless of the render, but I am sort of curious... What are you rendering that's taking so long in the process?
It's not e complexity, it's the sheer quantity of the animations to render out. Generally I keep each frame render time to about 1 to 2 seconds (for weapons and equipment), but when each asset renders out at around 3500 frames, even at a one second per frame render, the render time is just about an hour. Multiply that times the hundreds of assets and you get the idea. Add to this time the fact that I'm going through each asset and performing minor fixes and changes and time gets added in on top of that, then there's post-production, yada, yada.
As for the target resolution, that really isn't a part of the conversation at this point. But my focus was to enable the pipeline to support whatever resolution we decide to render at (if we decide to render out high-resolution animations) while still supporting the lower resolution renders at the same time within the same animation render cycle.
-Grimm
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