Just wondering if there is a way to spped up the AO calculations in a render.  I am using one IBL with AO on and 2 infinite lights with no AO.  With firefly set on very low settings with raytrace bounces at 1 a small texture size, etc...it takes for ever to render a daft scene to see how my image is looking.  I know raytracing takes more time, but is 45 min too long to render a scene with V3, Daz Morphing Fantasy dress, Koz Messy Hair and the Daz Cyclorama in draft mode?  Any tips on this from the masters?

I'm not a master or anything - It's possible that it's the Kos Messy hair slowing things down a bit. It's a transmapped hair right? It may be that it's taking a lot of time to calculate the AO for all the transparency materials.

If you haven't done so already, I'd disable raytracing from the object properties of the hair object. You could also disable the cast shadows for that object and postwork something in later.

Any reflections will add a load of time - check quality settings on any reflection nodes.

Otherwise I have no idea.

Incidentally, it's not a bad way of troubleshooting a scene by disabling certain items from raytracing or lowering the values of render features etc and seeing what effect it has on render times.

It is a transmapped hair.  There are quite a few transparencies going on in the scene as well.  I will try removing the hair from raytracing and see how it goes.  I may even go the route of rendering in layers and putting it back together in photoshop.  Thanks for the tips.