hide individual elements of your scene and render and composite them in PS or a compositing package. rumour has it that maya was on the weak side of rendering layers from the DVDs I have watched of pros work flow(one said maya layers werent the best, (what ever that meant??), none used render layers.., they rendered each scene as a complete and seperate pass and they then composited everything in shake.., Z-depth, elements in the scene, lights, shadows, specular.., blah blah.., all in shake (but AE, fusion , whatever will do too.., who cares??).

when you upgrade.., well thats another story, you'll be on top of it all (maybe go and buy some RAM today)

do each tire, body and piece it together, that way you could do some nice post effects (did steve already say this??). l

good guy?? ME??? ( when good Im OK when bad very bad )

steve, how do you render from the command line.., i hear you can render with maya shut down??