I am a huge fan of Blender and it is the tool I use when I need to create high-end 3D animation. When my renders take too long I use the render farm BlenderGrid.
Recently, Blendergrid had published an article on tricks that Pixar uses to speed up their workflow.
I found it interesting and I had thought many of you find it interesting, also if you do not use Blender I highly recommend you take a look, the best part is that it is free to download and incredibly powerful.
Here is the link to the article: https://blendergrid.com/learn/articles/how-pixar-speeds-up-their-3d-workflow