I just recently started playing around with Clarisse iFX for doing look dev and scene building. It's some kit. Handles billions of polygons effortlessly.
No need to make a low poly version. It seems very artist friendly as really all you do is bring the pieces from all other software (c4d, Houdini, z-brush) and render it out to comp. They offer PLE , subscription version, freelance and studio versions. Not going to lie, after watching several presentations and tutorials on it I bought it straight away. Perpetual license with a really affordable yearly maintenance.
It autosaves every few seconds because the project file is KB's in size. All it does is reference all the objects rather than bloat up. Worth looking at the PLE to check it out.