Update

Right yesterday was a bit of the good the bad and the ugly, having finally got all the files in one place, we made the camera move. The file size meant that everything needed to be done in wire frame mode but kind of to be expected with some of the sizes we were playing around with. it ran a lot quicker with ross and caspars running just the ground planes which we used to do test renders and eventually settying up the writing, with theirs switched off we were rendering at about 10 frames in 15 minutes not bad.
we used the same sysytem of turning layers off to get the lighting done aswell rendering at about the same speed. it came to doing a 10 frame test of the whole scene and it just stopped dead and would not progress through the render.
Eventually we decided the only way to find ou what was causing the problems was to batch render individual frames with individual layers on to see what was causing the problem. Going through this took ages but eventually we discovered that it was only the plants layer with the duplicated ferns on that wouldn't render out.
So now i'm goin back through the files to recreate the plants with painefects to try and eradicate the problem and hopefully the render will progress smootly after they have been replaced.
I was going to put up the rendered stills of the progression through the stages yesterday and some of my construction drawings but blogger doesn't have the post picture optiuon at the moment so i'll check again later.

aS