That's not quite true - render time still is very important, even for the biggest studios like ILM/SPI/Dreamworks with the biggest renderfarms.
However, yeah, artist time is more costly, and recently GI pathtracing raytracers have made huge inroads in the VFX industry due to the fact that lookdev/lighting configuration is much quicker for the artists due to being physically-based, so you get very realistic lighting without faking it with AO or virtual lights.
It definitely speeds the iterative process up when the artists can see how the scenes looks on their workstation without kicking it off to the renderfarm and waiting 4 hours for a render to come back.
With Arnold or VRay, it's possible to get a very fast 3/4-bounce GI solution with heavy geometry and textures in a matter of minutes.
You have a point, however in regards to render times I was more speaking to films in this budget range. Big studios have custom toolchains, and do everything in-house, rendering included. If you are using non-proprietary 3D software, there are rendering services at your disposal that are often pretty reasonably priced.
However, yeah, artist time is more costly, and recently GI pathtracing raytracers have made huge inroads in the VFX industry due to the fact that lookdev/lighting configuration is much quicker for the artists due to being physically-based, so you get very realistic lighting without faking it with AO or virtual lights.
It definitely speeds the iterative process up when the artists can see how the scenes looks on their workstation without kicking it off to the renderfarm and waiting 4 hours for a render to come back.
With Arnold or VRay, it's possible to get a very fast 3/4-bounce GI solution with heavy geometry and textures in a matter of minutes.