Quote - ...RayTrace shadows are severe and blur(5-12) does not take care of all of it so, I usually set shadow to 0.400 to help disperse it (on skin).

Just to be clear, when you say "set shadow to 0.400" you're talking about the shadow bias - or is it something else?  If it's bias I usually start with it at about  0.1 and then adjust it if I'm getting ambient occlusion related artifacts.  I usually don't go higher than 1.1 or lower than 0.01 (and very rarely at that), but I've not noticed any render time impact as a result.

Quote - If using a spot you can choke the angle 0start 60end to soften some more. You need an ibl fill in the scene for this... it takes up the slack on the mainlight. A rimlight can either assist the mainlight or (attached) create a nice highlight (RayT also). With this setup, I can crank out a render every 6-10 minutes with decent results. Granted, not as spectacular as a nice face_off setup but, 10 times quicker. Switching the mainlight to shadowmap/3072 for the final is a nice alternative.

I'd be really interested to see your "standard" render settings and light set up - any chance you could post them here?

I often find myself wishing there were additional raytrace settings on the lights so that for instance they did only specular and didn't add more actual light to the scene or so they only cast shadows and don't add any light to the scene.  Then you could use one ibl for the actual light, one for specular/reflection/refraction and either the same one or a different one for shadows.  Maybe there's a setting in there I haven't found or hacked that will allow for that - but I haven't found it yet. 

Quote - So, you were using RayTrace in your tests? That explains the eyelash shadows! Shadowmaps don't do eyelashes too well.

Yeah, I've got my default environment set to load up with just two lights, one infinite and one ibl.  I only have shadows enabled for the infinite light - raytraced.  I mess around with the intensity of the two depending on what I'm after, but generally the infinite is the main light and the ibl is the fill (I forget which but one of FaceOffs scripts (realism or occlusion) doesn't work with IBL as the more prominent light in the scene).  I can do o.k. with those two - it's a workaday arrangement.  If I want to get more involved/spectacular I can add lights from there.

Quote - Also, before you raise pixel samples or shading rate, try scaling your scene 1000%. I have yet to test this but I'm sure it's a solution for something. RayTrace is strangled at Poser scale. Reflect/Refract/artifacting dissappears at 1000% scale. Ronstuff proved this in P5 on an old thread of mine. Bump and some other shader nodes do not scale with the figure so, a manual job will be needed. 0.01bump becomes 0.100 at scaled version. Worth a look into...

This is fascinating stuff.  It's amazing how the incredibly bad mistake of what the default Poser scale was set to in the beginning  has had such long lasting and numerous negative affects.  I'm somewhat loath to do the scaling thing since I'd have to adjust all the cameras, figures, props and everything too, but it might be interesting to see what scaling up can do.

Quote - When you get to hair, please let me know.

Will do - perhaps this weekend.