Quote - Unzipped, You're probably burned out but, 75% is too much of a reduction for this distance imo (don't call me that,,,lol). Skin, I set from 50-70% depending on distance to camera (full figure view only). > Interesting it did not help speed. This is still relative as I'm sure it lowered memory usage(how many hi-res skins vs low-res skins you can render in one pass). I don't reduce the skin at all for a head shot. < I see in your last post you covered this with bucket size. The "Wildhair", oddly looks much better to me despite the huge reduction. I reduced mine 50% and was still getting artifacting with shading rate at 1.00. Your reduction seems right. Koz hair is conforming (a figure)? Definately too much reduction here. I use 75% of original. It screams for a low shading rate as do most of his. Some displacement, too.

For this test I was only concerned with seeing how things affect render time.  I went down to a 512 width on all maps as I figured that would be the minimum you could go down to and still have an o.k. texture, assuming that you would then see the largest decrease in render time possible.  As it turns out even a 75% reduction had a minimal affect on render time, so I'm left feeling there really isn't much point in doing the reduction at all and risking detail loss as long as you're not running into memory issues.  I'm certain a lesser reduction would cause less of a degradation of detail quality, but I'm not certain it's even worth the effort if the goal is simply to reduce render time.

Quote - One thing, you have RayTrace(2-3) bounces on for what? Reflect nodes on eyes? This is slowing you down, imo. If not using reflect nodes, I'd set it to 0.00bounces. face_off always has reflects on his eyes. Maybe that's why they are in his settings. and yours

Yes as I mentioned at one point above, I do use reflection for my eye materials in every render, so I leave the ray trace bounces in - although I actually only have it set to 1 in my final render settings as seen above.  In my testing changing the ray trace bounces had very little impact on the render times.  Now that may change if the scene becomes more full, but I can adjust downward from here if necessary.  Also I would think when using ray traced shadows, the number of bounces would affect the resulting shadows as well, so 0 would not be a good setting in that case.

Quote - ... And I noticed you have AO off in this run. Turning "visible in RayTracing" off on the hair should have a dramatic decreasing effect in rendertime. I did not hear you mention if it was on/off. All in all a very helpful run of tests. I'll have to be stubborn about the hair texture reduction technique as you really went too low in res with this example. Stewer recommended a 20-50% reduction. I've had spectacular results. Awesome stuff! This is how you get your renders. No more throwing darts...

As I mentioned somewhere above, I'm using face_off's realism kit here, and do on almost all my renders.  So the light A/O is off, but the figure itself bears A/O nodes, thus the visible in ray tracing needs to be on, at least for those things that can cast shadows on the figure itself.

Now where is that light set up of yours !?!? ;)