So having done lots of lighting tests, played with GI and Final Gather settings days to optimise render times etc etc I've now just spent the best part of two week not rendering a single frame!
My scene has been behaving really strangely. Amongst other things lighting updates weren't rippling through from my referenced files,
materials were mysteriously falling off assets and after painstakingly
setting up render layers I was then getting locked out of them with error
messages about missing nodes.
However, I finally know what was causing the problem. Maya's not very robust when it comes to combining referencing and render layers. After much googling I came across this post - appropriately titled "why your render layers break" which was an absolute saviour
http://www.toadstorm.com/blog/?p=26
Because the problems I was encountering were so various I didn't realise at first that they had a common source. Great to know what the problem is now though.
Fortunately my project is simple enough that I can just import the environments and rigs into my anim scenes, redo the lighting in situ, and use this as my final render scene.
Gah, why is it that I hit my worst technical problem so close to the final deadline? :)
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