This was a Final in one of my Autodesk Maya classes. It is 120 frames long, running at 15 frames a second, and is at 720p at 25% quality. It took over 2 days to just render the 8 second clip at those settings, otherwise it would have taken 35 days of solid rendering to achieve a 1080p, 100% Quality clip at the same 120 frames. Below are some before and after images, and the comparison between the initial High resolution render and the final product.

Here we have the raw 3D model in Autodesk Maya before running it through Mental Ray, a rendering engine.

This was the first test render at 100% Quality, 1080p resolution. This render alone took over 7 hours to render, leaving my workstation useless for those 7 hours.

This was the final product, textures smoothed out, lighting adjusted, and the resolution/quality turned down. This drastically reduced the render time per frame down to around 30 minutes.