@James Hey man, Sorry it took me so long to reply. Thanks again for all of your advice I appreciate it. One thing you have hammered home is that my scenes need to be as built as efficiently as possible and not over whelm with adding in 10's of thousands of small, tiny details. Now I do wonder how one balances this with things like Grass for landscaping or characters with lots of hair. I guess I could use the Toon shader and give them anime style hair with no individual hair follicles. But the point you make about doing everything I can to optimize the scene for rendering efficiency is received. Thanks for the advice on the nodes. I was going to get the old R15 Opteron Servers because they had 64 cores each at 2.4ghz(2.8 turbo) but reading what you have written about speed of the clocks being important, maybe that would not be a good render node. https://www.ebay.com/itm/DELL-PowerEdge-R815-4x-Opteron-6278-64-cores-2-4Ghz-64GB-H700-2-5-6-bay-Server/302943928255?hash=item4688dd7fbf:g:FEkAAOSwFURb3Nbz:rk:15:pf:0 So I have much to think about and I want to get this right. Considering animation is my goal, should I consider a real time render engine instead?

James, firstly thanks for your considered and well thought out reply. Indeed, I do have a heck of a lot to learn about blender and rendering optimization. Your point about optimizing the scene before rendering as to reduce render times is important. From what I have found out so far some changes in say number of samples or number or ray bounces can lead to big render time changes. So your point about using the tool to my advantage and not disadvantage is well received. You mention not giving minute detail on trivial things like, tennis balls and other non essential to the plot/story items. Makes sense, as why waste compute power on things that are only incidental. So thank you for that reminder. Correct me if I am wrong, but there are a number of things I am gleaning from your post. First, get as much ram as possible as that is important. Secondly that no matter how many computers I string together It will still take a good amount of time to render an animation but that time will be a lot shorter then if I was doing it on one computer. Basically that I need to be prepared to wait no matter what. Which leads to the next point I got from you, in that I need to do everything I can to make the scene as efficient as possible so I can reduce render times. That one is an ongoing lesson. I will have to keep reading and learning the system from articles and videos. You mentioned expensive ways of rendering a scene, can you give me an example? Or was the Tennis ball hair the example for that? Regarding nodes. I was hoping for some advice on that. Would it be better to get a few older dual cpu servers on Ebay, or would just stringing a bunch of mini pcs together(with upgraded ram) be better for a bare budget farm? Thanks again for your time in reading and helping me.