All the world's a stage...

by Billy Ray Shakespeare

This is the second in a series where I come up with Uncomplicated Ideas™ that would really have helped me out if I thought of them at the beginning of the project.  Today's idea--just make a stage!

This is a variation of me re-learning life's lessons.  In this case, #6 from Lessons I Wish I Would Learn -- Work Big To Small!  A good way to start any project is to block out the rough structure and composition before diving into the details.  Part of that process can be to plan for memory required for the final render, which can include things like render layers and compositing.  Deciding which parts will be the stage and which parts will be the "actors" early on will be helpful.

Not only will Future You be thankful at render time, but you will speed things up for Worker Bee You, too!  For this discussion, let's assume you are making a scene with some terrain, maybe some vegetation, a house, a car and a dog.   The house and the terrain are probably going to be mostly static.  They would be part of the Stage.  The car and the dog might move around, so they will be considered "actors"; i.e., not part of the stage.  The vegatation could go either place.  

Create a master file (call it 'ProjectMaster.blend') for your project.  This will be what you use to render.  Create another file just for the stage (call it 'ProjectStage.blend').  You can use this for your initial rough block-out.  You could also have a separate file for the actors or include them in your master file.  It depends on how complicated your scene will be.

Inside the Stage file, do all your normal work inside a collection; in this case, called 'Stage'.  This will contain all of your 'ready-to-render' items.  But those 4 billion faces will slow everything down once you start to add the other detail like the car and the dog.  So create another collection, called 'Low Poly Items'.  All the large items can be in their normal collection plus this 'Low Poly Item' collection.  If you were modeling a house, you would put the exterior walls here, but not the roof shingles, the door knobs, or rain gutters, or other highly detailed items.  This is intended just to approximate the space when adding the other, moveable details.  For my example, you want to roughly know where to position the car and the dog, but you don't need full fidelity during modeling.   To get high- and low-fidelity without having to do every change twice, create a 'Low-Poly Stage' collection and put any simple geometry inside.  That geometry will only be used to connect a Geometry Nodes modifier.

Now, in your ProjectFinal.blend file, you can link the Stage For Export collection from your Stage file.  Create a Library Override, so you can turn visibility on or off.  Most of the time, you can have the Low-Poly Stage visible, and only turn on the full-resolution version when you need to fine-tune something.  But, since the Stage collection is set to Render, even when not visible in the viewport, you will always get the 4 billion faces, in all their glory, when you test render.

At the end of all this, you have kept file sizes down so you work at blinding speed.  You have the modifiers working for you, so you don't need to keep turning things on and off to switch from Work Mode to Render Mode.  You started off the project with some good Pre-Planning and Really Cool Blocking.  Really, there isn't much left for you to do, but sit back and bask in the glow of your awesomeness!