it depends entirely on what your rendering as to how long it will take, using global ilumination to render (the gray, and coloured pic) usually takes me about 15 minutes for a polygon intensive scene, or high resolution, so if i were to make both high res, and ultra cg style high poly models, then it would take hours yes,
but those took about 10 minutes each.
the last image is teh figurine.
and i started texturing the model earlyer, heres the rough WIP image, please feel free to give any suggestions and comments.