Quote - Some questions about the two renders:

1. What were the render settings and size of the image?
2. What were the light settings and positioning?
3. How powerful is your computer?
4. How long did it take to render an image?

I need to be able to balance quality with quantity as I make poser comics rather than singular potraits. Until recently, I only had a Pentium so anything intensive took forever to render. Now I have a Quad Core, it would be worth it to boost up the render features as my processor(s) is faster.

Thanks.

For comics rendering, based on my own experiences, here's what I recommend:

1.  Simple skin shaders is a big one.  Simple texture, maybe a simple bump.  It's not so much that the more complicated ones necessarily take up significantly more time to render, but if you're doing anything with them, it becomes a pain in the ass when you have to fool around in the material room.  As a for-instance, take a gander at my gallery and an image like this one.  The skin is a reflective node setup combined, via blend nodes controlled by a mask, with the texture and bump maps.  However, even that simple setup means I need five blends: the diffuse, the specular, the reflection_value, bump, and alternate_specular (the reason fro the two specualrs is because the skin uses that, while the reflective surface uses the alternate).  I could probably get away with dumping the specular, and for long distances, the bump, but that still uses three.

And, as I said, this was a relatively simple one.  Now, imagine what happens when you've got a base skin shader that's attached to the diffuse, the specular, the ambient, transluscence, bump, displacement, alternate_diffuse, and alternate_specular, and you've got to try to wedge your changes in there, plus your changes have multiple node setups of their own?  For one-off pictures, that's fine, or even for a single character you'll use repeatedly, but setting up multiple or one-off characters?  Blech.  When I'm setting up characters, I tend to ruthlessly strip the shaders down to the basics even if I'm not planning something funky.

2.  Keep the effects to a minimum in the render.  I rarely go more than 4 raytrace bounces for comic renders, regardless of what's in the scene.  Displacement?  If really necessary.  Bump often gets the chopping block as well.  If a crude reflection map will make it faster, and I don't need an accurate reflection?  Do it.  Ambient Occlusion?  Skippable.  Atmosphere?  Oy, avoid that if needed.  Depth of field?  Faster to fake in Photoshop.

3.  Cheat mercilessly with the lights.  If there should be 8 lights in the room, and you can get by with 2, or even 1 and an IBL, do it.  The shadows might not be perfectly correct, but if the comic is telling a story well enough, people won't notice.

Thing with the lights though, and it's probably the single biggest problem I have with most Poser-based comics, is that they skimp on the shadows and use pretty much the basic lighting setup.  It's understandable that they do it, since shadows take time to render, and getting it right takes time, but after a while I find it looks like complete shit.