what setup is used in a “typical” animated feature film shot?
i understand that the method required is determined by the shot, but I would still think setups utilizing GI would probably be avoided and Jeremy Birn mentions in his book that shadow maps are used more often than raytraced shadows.
what other “features” are commonly enacted? for example in a standard indoor shot? outdoor?
thanks to anyone could enlighten me. 
It depends on where you work.
Blue Sky uses their own renderer. It uses indirect lighting by default. And while they don’t like to mention too much, it’s probably a path tracer. (It’s slooooow)
Renderman is the most often used renderer for animated film and they indeed use indirect lighting, but it’s not generally raytraced since that erodes the benefit of rasterization. They will use point clouds to render indirect lighting without having to raytrace. Non-raytraced shadows are also faster to motion blur because they are a post-process. This also works well with a REYES rendering engine.
VFX work will use a raytracer more often than not.
So you can indeed use GI lighting and set-up practical lights in your scene. A lot of the “baking” process is hidden from most lighting artists at places like ILM, Disney, or Pixar because they have a lot of tools and massive development behind them to simplify the workload.
Point-Based Global Illumination
You can find more in the above link about the technical aspects of how a lot of GI can be implemented in Animated Feature Film
i thought i knew something about lighting/rendering until i read your reply 
thank you very much for your comprehensive reply, I see I have a lot of research to do haha
Not to naysay Jeremy Birn at all, he’s a great help, but for interior and exterior arch/viz type work, I stick to raytracing entirely. There are many reasons, but the main two:
Realism. Raytracing means refractions and reflections are accurate, as well as GI lighting and other forms of indirect illumination and shadows.
Render speed. Raytracing is highly optimizable, and sometimes my scenes are huge. Using instances and optimization techniques (such as BSP2 in mental ray) makes these billions-of-poly scenes possible on a small, 8GB workstation.
Not sure what kind of work you’ll be doing, but if you want realism of the kind you see here a lot in arch/viz stuff, raytracing is very important.
Thank you for all the input, it’s good to know what’s being used and what I still have to learn.
I think now days almost every studio uses GI for their shots the only thing difference is how they calculate it,Point base or raytrace (using monte carlo or quassi monte carlo) in adaptive or constant mode.
Regarding the set-up as most of the big Studios have their own software so they don’t care how you achieve the result unless it is taking very huge time.
I have seen people using hundreds of lights for one scene .So if you are starting your shot I would say first go for the look layer by layer and then optimise the scene,this way it works much faster though it appears otherwise but you will achieve good detailing with some awsome quality.
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