pjz, my impression garnered from other people I respect is that # of raytrace bounces is more oriented toward how many reflections etc etc you need. For the purpose you describe, wouldn't IDL bounces be more important?

Ghostofmacbeth, for final renders with IDL, you generally don't need as high of settings as you would otherwise. I usually try to get my scene to render with about 6 pixel samples (never more than 10), roughly 300 IDL samples, and a shading rate of 0.2 or even 0.4. (Without IDL, I find shading rate is a lot more critical, although since P8 even conventional lighting renders better at higher shading rates, IMO.)

Personally, I rarely render with more than 3 raytrace bounces unless I've got a ton of reflections. But pjz has far more experience than I do, so FWIW.

Of course, what you are doing with your final renders will determine exactly how high of quality you want. I just post to forum galleries with a bit of enlargement, usually.

BTW, when you do get to rendering hair with IDL, by all means get your hands on some dynamic models. Strand-based hair now renders incomparably faster than transmapped hair does.

______________

Hardware: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X/MSI MAG570 Tomahawk X570/Zotac Geforce GTX 1650 Super 4GB/32GB OLOy RAM

Software: Windows 10 Professional/Poser Pro 11/Photoshop/Postworkshop 3