[lisa]

Don't sweat it. You might not be able to push as many polys as the "pros", but even the pros use A LOT of tricks to do what they do... they don't push as many polys as you'd think, because they have to keep the render times in check.

Some common tricks: Surface shading often makes a bigger difference than poly-count allow. Try playing with crease angle, and you'll see. Another trick along those lines is normal mapping. This is especially useful for high-detail surfaces, for things like pores or wrinkles on a character's skin, although games use it even for larger details.

Also, most films are rendered in multiple passes, both because of memory and render time... even they can't have that much stuff all in one shot either; so they render different parts using the best tools for the job, then comp it. A film studio may build dozens of different versions of the same object at different levels of detail, known as LOD. When the object is distant, they'll use the low LOD, and switch to a higher one only when the object is close. Often, the close-up model is just a partial--it only includes just the items visible in the shot--to keep the memory footprint manageble.

Sometimes, objects that don't change in the frame aren't rendered on each frame: a single billboard is rendered, then the billboard is used in the shot to cut times on subsequent frames. The billboard only gets re-rendered when the camera has moved enough that the angle has changed. This is known as an "imposter" object.

As well, some objects benefit from raytracing, but others don't, so it's also very common to render different objects with different quality settings and composite them. What you see in the final frame of a Hollywood movie is almost never rendered all at the same time.

You can use all of these same tricks on a smaller scale to make your scenes look very professional, even on a small budget.