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That's probably an artifact of whether or not the artist had the skin texture "bleed" past the seams on the geometry's UV map. If you're seeing white lines, it's likely they went to the seam and stopped instead of going past it.
Turn your Max Samples down to about 5-600 and turn your Rendering Quality up to around 300. You'll be surprised how much this will help.
Composite renders via gimp or photoshop. Render your main characters in Iray and do your background scene in 3delight. This is especially true for night scenes. Then composite in the photo manipulator of your choice. Get rid of fireflies and make everything look great. If you have the time to render at different lights levels and exposures you can even fake HDRI looking images.
I find that the real time consumer is skin: the more skin in the foreground (and the closer to the camera), the longer it takes to render. So the main characters are the problem, not the backgrounds.
It seems that many developers are religiously using "Uber shader", as a base-line for materials. (For may reasons.)
Where possible, replace those shaders/materials with a more simple and less "do it all" shader. Especially if your material doesn't even use half the values in the shader.
Complex shaders take longer to render, even when they are all blank. I don't suggest using the "Uber shader" for things like wood, metal, glass or simple single-texture items, or for lighting. Try a prefab shader and just replace the textures with ones from the shader that is in the item. (If you duplicate the object, you will see the textures in the list, for selection, when changing textures on the other item. You can swap back and forth to set similar values.)
Have you tried doing night or dark scenes in iray? I made this suggestion because they take forever in iray. I render the subject with plenty of light and tone down subject in photoshop. Dark scenes are very dynamic but they are hard to create with iray that is why I suggested compositing.
No, I have not really had occasion to render dark scenes. I have been wondering about compositing, however. Especially for short animations. I was wondering about the process - maybe render a scene with background (perhaps a room with furniture) and then separately render the character animations against a transparent background and composite them in a video editor. I usually use Blender as a video editor but, out of interest, I downloaded HitFilm Express for free and that looks like it is pretty well set up for compositing so maybe I'll give it a whirl.
Just looking back over this thread and I noticed this tip. I was having lots of issues with bright pixels (fireflies?) around glossy areas which took a long time to clear. Trying your tip and setting Nominal Luminance to 500 cleared them immediately. A much belated thanks for that!
I use the optimizer a lot as well, mainly on scenery. I set up the scene without characters, with the lighting I want. Then I test render it, and see how much VRAM it takes up. The newer IUray products usually take up a lot. Then I half it, save the halved scene, and add the characters., I don't use the optimizer on characters unless there are a lot of them, in which case I'll run it on the ones in the background. Alternatively I sometimes just turn down the resolution on each character.
About removing stuff from the scene that is not visible, is it enough to switch those things off in the node pane (the little eye) or do I actually have to delete it from the scene?