This will be a quick little update. Everyone knows each 3D package has their strengths and weaknesses. Like Maya is super flexible but horrible with simulations, and Houdini is amazing with simulations but you can pretty much forget about UV's and keyframe character animation of anything more than 2...

Pointclouds and brickmaps can improve the render performance greatly since they “bake” a 3d model with any shader data that is needed for the render just once, and can be used over and over again. In some cases the original model doesn’t even have to be used for the render, brickmap which is free...