Quote - Hey, unzipped, What are your Light settings? Are you going RayTrace or shadowmap? Spot or infinite,,,? Rim lights? I may be able to duplicate this as I have "Wild hair" and am unable to upload a zip until I get something fixed. >>>"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..." That lightset was never meant to be fuel efficient. Are you sure you want to test with these settings? You kinda picked a "Rolls Royce" for a sprintcar challenge....It deals with light leaks(0.01bias) very well and deliveres a crisp shadow (3072map). These are the 2 speed culprits. face_off has explained this here publicly. If you have your primary light as RayTrace, then it's not a face_off lightsetting. The more I know, the better. Just checked out Wildhair....a dozen separate imagemaps to switch out later,,, groan. lol

No I'm just using his render settings - I don't have his light settings.  I started with his settings as my high quality baseline to compare against - you've got to have a control in any experiment and his render settings are a known quantity.  My lighting setup is the same as it was before (top of post), I'm trying to keep as many things as constant as possible during these tests.  So we're using raytraced shadows, not mapped.  I picked the Wild Hair because I knew intuitively that it was a beast in terms of render times, and I'm also going to compare it against a more lightweight hair model. 

Results soon to follow....