and by no means is that what id call an 'ideal' render, just something i slapped together for this.
but i will break down the massive importance of some of the settings that are compromised on with this post.

1. antialiasing. pixel samples.
   a big giveaway in 3D is when the edges of your character are jagged and pixellated. this jaggedness never occurs with a film camera - negatives can be enlarged to a theoretical infinite size without it appearing.
   yes, it has a drastic impact on rendering speed. but in many renders a low antialiasing will result in a very noticeable jaggedness around edges. a good compromise is around 5 -- i actually used a pixel sample setting of 4-5 for years, its just lately that i am bumping it up to around 18 or so because it looks better and ill gladly add a half hour of rendering time to squeeze the most out of my render.

2. shadow min. bias
   shadow min bias basically determines the detail level of the shadows. the poser default is inadequate even for nostrils, eyelashes, etc. a shadow min bias of 1.0 is far too high. i generally use around 0.12-0.15, and will only start raising it in .01 increments if strangeblack artifacts start to appear (this is actually caused by polygons self-shadowing). the lighting angle is bad for this one (i didnt adjust it for this render), but with the shadow min bias setting in the high quality render the eyelashes, nostrils, even the eyelids are casting shadows. with proper lighting this makes a huge difference. with a high shadow min bias small detail like eyelashes, clothing hems, etc WILL NOT cast shadows. suffice to say a render without fine shadow detail under clothing hems, for example, will not look realistic at all.

3. max texture size
   this does not really affect render speed that much. you are doing a huge disservice to your texture creators by completely eliminating the detail they spend weeks painting. if your render took 5 minutes, it would take possible 8-10 minutes to render with a full 4096 texture resolution. is it worth losing 3/4 of the detail to save 3-5 minutes on a render?

4. min shading rate
   again, a min shading rate of 2.00 pretty much halves the detail in your render again. so we are down to what, 1/8th detail? if you are only concerned with speed and not with detail then why not render in the poser 4 engine? the above scene could have been rendered in less than a minute with the P4 renderer and actually still have 100% of the detail and more accurate shadows.