A couple of Maya questions
 

Outliner
I was recently grouping my objects in the outliner and stumbled across a bunch of pcube### objects that weren't visible on screen (move tool just moves itself pretty much). So I just ended up deleting them. Nothing notable...so far, but I thought I'd make sure that it's ok to just delete these empty objects.

In the outliner, they don't have the polygon icon; instead they have that same icon as the Groups I've created- a blank parallelogram.

Grouping
Is there a way to center to move/scale/rotate bars on objects that I have grouped together? Each time I group something, the move/rotate tool will reset to the 0,0,0 position regardless of where the group is. I hope there is someway to relocate the bars to the center of the group.

To get rid of trash objects, use File > Optimize Scene Size. This will get rid of those types of things as well as unused materials and so on. If it's still in your scene, most likely it's being used by something, probably through history (like 2 objects that were combined together).

Modify > Center Pivot

Can also press the Insert key on the keyboard to manually relocate a pivot.

Thank you.

Rather than make a new topic I should just keep all my queries to this thread. So here comes another one;

I'm working on making a short animation clip (roughly 45 seconds) and I'm currently in the modelling phase. Right now my character (a robot) has:

~7,000 Verts
~12,000 Edges
~6,000 Faces
~13,000 Tris
~9,000 UVs

It's roughly 80% complete and everything is still in lambert1. Rendering at 640x480 software production quality ranges from 5-15 seconds. From that, I'm theorizing that the animation would take 30 seconds to render each frame so it's pretty much 45 x 24 x 30 = 32400 or 9 hours of rendering time if I used the model for the entire duration of the animation. Would this be a good guess?

For color, it's going to be pretty much lambert and a couple of Blinns here and there and it looks like I'll have about 15 or so textured polys.

Make sure you render them out as images (TIFF or TAGA) when merge them into a move later. Don't render as a move as your file sizes will be sky high.