I have encountered a problem... I'm having to do some renders of a scene for uni, for the coming friday, and I've realised that having a lot of low-power IES lights has ruined my render speeds. I'm trying to optimise it as much as I can, playing around with exposure and power settings of the lights/ gamma/ ISO -> you get the picture... Sometimes the results are a lot faster with the power of the lights cranked all the way up, sometimes when they are down, then I get a lot of noise in certain situations, and the possibility for a nightime animation is becoming more of a dream than reality.
Could anyone take a look at it and tell me where I'm going wrong? Or it simply IS that long to render, even with octane?
There is around 35 IES lights in the scene, with the final predicted count being closer to 60.
Also, has somebody found a workaround hot-pixels? I seem to get them a lot, the render would look soo much nicer without them. They show even after the hotpixel removal is set to 0. If I understand this correctly, then hotpixels appear in areas where the ray bounces from the environment back to the camea at a very shallow angle right? So if there was a way of blurring them out?...
Any help appreciated.
P.S.: You can use the models in the scene in your own scenes(so long you help me!


Anyways, any help appreciated. If you download a scene and find a cure, could you upload it back please so I can see how you set it up? Saves time -> $$

Thanks

Jani.