Ah, that answers the quiestion I had above about rendering. I use Afterburner to ramp up my fan curves, and I have a very well-ventilated case full of fans; I've found that keeping the GPUs cool (<70C) gives them a long and happy life.
I've seen a few tutorials on how to create HDRI lighting from regular mesh sets; that might be worthwhile to try out to cut render times...
You do top-notch work; looking forward to seeing more!
I keep my GPUs <70° as well, sadly that doesn't protect the cards from dying. My 2080 also died recently, funnily enough, after I send it into retirement (in my second pc). Rendering takes it's toll, especially if you do it nearly every day.
Hdri's have a very specific problem: they don't scale properly and tend to look weird in certain angles, so I'd have to make several hdri's for several situations, angles, camera positions, which doesn't really help speeding up the process. Anyway, I'm good on the hardware side by now, rendering time isn't that much of a problem anymore (though it will always be to a degree).
