Here's an interesting one. I've rendering with relatively hi quality settings (with no hair, still decent render times - under 9 minutes for an original render at 692x720; I'll post a screen shot of settings below).

The face shadow and detail looks very good. Background and shirt are fine. But what's with the neck and the plant? Blotchy as all get-out. Is this something I've got funny in my settings? They don't look like the usual "artifacts."

And here's a screen shot of the D3D advanced render settings.

The plant looks like it has double-sided polygons.

Yeah, I was wondering if there was something funny with the plant. Maybe I need to do a normals forward on it.

Still doesn't explain the neck, in any case, which is my bigger concern. I've been rendering with higher and higher settings to see what happens. Right now my settings are on the "ridiculous" end of the scale; I'll see where that gets me when the render is done in a couple minutes....

Well, as far as the neck goes, the "ridiculous" render settings largely did the trick. Created some minor artifacting still, including the off-colour blotch on the upper lip that wasn't there at lower quality... but those are the sorts of issues I expect to see fixed with SR1, so I'm not so worried about that.

Here's a screen shot of my "ridiculous" settings. :) It took about 38 minutes on my Q6600 machine.

we need to whait until SP1.

Quote - we need to whait until SP1.

and wait... and wait....

sorry . i mean wait he he :)

Heh. Here I went absolutely insane with the settings. Never completed a render this hi-Q before. 2 hrs and 24 min.

I want my SR1!!!!

Here's my settings.

If I could get this quality of render (without the remaining neck splotchiness) in this amount of time WITH HAIR I'd be plenty happy. But I know that's not likely to happen, even with SR1. (P8 chokes when I've got hair and settings much, much lower than this. Last night I had this same scene apparently stop rendering after over 16 hours... the bucket stopped moving a little less than halfway into the render.)

in maya,3dsmax,renderman,v-ray,mentelray rendering hair with GI is long.....looooooooooooooooooooooooong

Thought I read somewhere very recently that the Irradiance Cache for Raytracing shadows does not work very well for occlusion.  The current recommendation is to set that at zero. A 12 pixel sampling is rather high; that can increase render time significantly.  I use settings in that range for Depth of Field resolution.  Hopefully we will see big improvements with the SR1 release.

drop IC (red) to 10 or 20, incr. sample size to 4.0, increase samples to 4000 or grtr.  such extreme settings won't be needed in sr1/2. delete AO node on plant shader/figure.

hborre: IIRC, the IC setting actually doesn't do anything with IDL. Or that was the early word, so much confusion.

Nancy: haven't looked closely at that plant shader. I certainly don't put AO on materials at all anymore, but the content creator may have.