For the looping animation, learn up on expressions, it should help, with a tiny bit of MEL magic, its easy.

I don't really know how you would solve the rendering problem of a faster rendering of a lot of primitives without another renderer/raytracer with more advanced spatial subdivision sorting (and I don't know how you would get that without programming it, and maya's KD tree raytracer is realy good, better then mine :p)

Well, hope that helped

cya later,
Matt