Rendering in Miniature

[HuddahBuddha]

After finding out recently that the standard size of the Blender cube is 2 meters (read: huge) I've been toying with the idea of creating environments in 'miniature' for modeling/rendering animations. Is this possible? Can a convincing outdoor or indoor environment be created and lit when everything is only centimeters in size? Are there any specific render/material/lighting/camera etc. settings that would work better for something like this?

[B.Y.O.B.]

You can change the "scale" parameter in the scene tab
it defines how blender units are converted to physical/lux units.

a scale mismatch mostly makes the work on DoF and SSS harder.

[Pilchard123]

Don't forget transparent/translucent objects' absorption, etc.

[A-man]

You can change the "scale" parameter in the scene tab

I heard that the scale parameter didn't work correctly, so use with caution.

[B.Y.O.B.]

You can change the "scale" parameter in the scene tab

I heard that the scale parameter didn't work correctly, so use with caution.

I tested it a while ago and it did work with Blender 2.59 (I'm using that for rendering with Lux).

[HuddahBuddha]

Thanks to all for the tips - reducing the scale certainly took a good load off the rendering as well. I still can't get an image I would use for animation without rendering for well over 15 minutes, though. I looked at the Wiki page for animation rendering and have tweaked my settings to something similar, but so far the fastest I've gotten is around 12 minutes. Is there some way to reduce this any further to avoid waiting a couple days for a second or two of animation? Maybe I just need to build a render node?

[B.Y.O.B.]

Thanks to all for the tips - reducing the scale certainly took a good load off the rendering as well. I still can't get an image I would use for animation without rendering for well over 15 minutes, though. I looked at the Wiki page for animation rendering and have tweaked my settings to something similar, but so far the fastest I've gotten is around 12 minutes. Is there some way to reduce this any further to avoid waiting a couple days for a second or two of animation? Maybe I just need to build a render node?

I think if you could show a couple of screenshots of your scene (and rendersettings) or some of the renders you already have in a new WIP-thread in "works in progress", we could help you better. Optimization is often very scene-specific.