Okay, after trying to get this to work on some other machines (and applying a bunch of fixes to the scene file in the meantime), I've just given up.
The technical requirements for this particular scene* are simply obscene, and while I bet a lot of that is due to my failings as a 3D artist, that's just part of the deal.
So I'm not going to bother to coordinate anything on a large- or medium-scale here; I'm just going to hope that I can get this rendered on time with my own resources, and possibly kind loans from people who might have the appropriate hardware.
(Fortunately, I don't think anyone cares whether or not this gets done anymore. This is probably a good thing, considering how terrifically crappy this stuff looks in motion. You guys attending AWA 12 are in for a good guffaw. Or eight.)
All that said, if you want to give this a try, then by all means drop me a PM. I can upload the scene files, Blender source files, and precompiled binaries. Don't expect it to function, though.
Sorry for the hype.
* If you don't have >= 1.5 GB of RAM and are not running OS X or some GNU/Linux system, I do not believe it will work. The ridiculous amount of data will cause massive swap storms if you only have 1 GB of RAM, which will slow down rendering (and your computer) by a tremendous factor. The OS requirement is based on a bunch of observations, not any hard data -- I just know that Blender under Windows always crashes (while calculating the radiosity solution) no matter what I tweak in its memory allocation system, and I no longer have the time to go through the particle system and try to find memory optimizations there.
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