Our renders are getting extremely long, getting the 2+ hour kill on the renderfarm, and we need to figure out a way to optimize our scene and our textures to get this time down. Our biggest point of optimization is using tx files for our texture maps. This allows the renderer to use only the biggest map size it needs relative to the camera, instead of using high-res maps throughout the whole scene when most of them aren't necessary, especially towards the end of our camera move since everything is fairly far away from the camera.
Our first attempt at converting all of our textures to tx files, it did not really work correctly. It was not finding all of Joey's UDIMs for the lotus bath, and as it was going through all the textures it always got stuck on a certain texture and wouldn't move past it. So after many tries and asking other groups about it, we found out that the tx manager in Maya 2017 doesn't work. So we tried it in Maya 2016.5 and it worked perfectly. The only other thing we had to keep in mind was taking out the unpremult flag in the tx manager everytime we wanted to do this because it would gamma correct everything.