Found my old files (I was not as organized). The dates on some of these files brings back some troubling memories as I done work on the principals office back in the summer of 2021, and later on this class... my wife was still alive at that point... wow... sorry, just... dates are triggers for me.
Anyhow... here's some screenshots of my interface, look all I had to hide in order to render this in a reasonable amount of time! It's crazy, most of the class is missing, as is most of the hallway! LOL... I still had my 1050TI with only 4G of VRAM at the time, I actually rendered this at 200 iterations with denoising (denoising took lots of VRAM as well, so you had to free it up or you were doing a CPU render which took over an hour)...
A view looking towards the camera so you see how much I hid...
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I hid a all of the hallway that wasn't seen by the camera...
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I had forgotten about all of this until I seen your scene. Here's the render I done all of this for (this is a newer render I just did as my original is lost). It's not much, basically threw Sophia in to do a test render then got side tracked with other things... note that I didn't light the hallway like you did.
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I'll be working on updating this now that you got me thinking about it. Light that hallway and unhide everything at least.