Quote - will there be a sort of final render settings post?  because i think i've gotten lost on recommendations,  other than high bucket size is good.  oh, and unzipped, you know you can change the shading rate for each object/group, right?  so you can leave the render setting (minimum value) low, boost it up high for things where it doesn't matter and make it low for stuff where it does (like hair, eyelashes, etc.).    i mean, i'm betting you know since both you guys seem to be much more knowledgeable than i, but i thought i'd check.

I'm trying to work up to "final" render settings -  but in truth I don't think there will end up being any such thing.  It seems I'm developing a few different settings depending on which compromises I'm willing to make - but I think I'm zeroing in on one that's a good balance of quality and speed.  If I manage to get such a setting together I'll definitely post it here.

The individual object shading rate is something I knew, but it's something I always forget about - so it's definitely worth mentioning whenever anyone feels like mentioning it, so thanks very much for bringing it up.

I'm starting to do hair rendering comparisons now, I'm on my first baseline render using face-off's settings one V3 and Wild Hair - nothing else in the scene - shot from the face camera.  It's ugly time wise - it's been about 47 minutes and I think it's about half way done.  I've got to believe there's plenty that can be done to improve on that, but we'll see...

Unzipped