So, I was using Scene Optimizer because I my render kept falling back to CPU. (I've got a 1070 w/ 8GB, but the 6x G3F figures plus clothing/accessories and the background geometry was too much). 
After a bit of playing around the render was working on GPU again and all was good. As a bonus, it seemed to go much faster than many renders for scenes which might only have one or two figures...
The image quality after using S.O. was clearly not as good as the original, but as this render was just for background figures it doesn't matter so much. Add a bit of strategic Depth of Field, and considering that the BG figures will only be ~600px high covers up a lot of the sins.
At that moment, inspiration struck and I realized I needed to do some ORIGINAL RESEARCH (TM). Here is the result of my highly scientific study:
Note this is an test case only, not the one i was talking about before.
So basically the speed increases by 2.7x for a render that is not terrible compared to the original. Disabling the SSS makes a clear difference to the skin color, so that was covered up by using something other than white as the mixing tone for the base diffuse mat.
I've read before about how many figures come with 4K skin maps which are great for super close up, but are pointless for anything like the cases where the figure is 2+metre away from the camera. And given there is almost no difference between the 4K and 1K version at this render size (600x1024px), it seems to be completely true!
So, I hope you all take this to heart and BUY the S.O. product to support the author. Or just keep being dirty little pirates. lol.
After a bit of playing around the render was working on GPU again and all was good. As a bonus, it seemed to go much faster than many renders for scenes which might only have one or two figures...
The image quality after using S.O. was clearly not as good as the original, but as this render was just for background figures it doesn't matter so much. Add a bit of strategic Depth of Field, and considering that the BG figures will only be ~600px high covers up a lot of the sins.
At that moment, inspiration struck and I realized I needed to do some ORIGINAL RESEARCH (TM). Here is the result of my highly scientific study:
Note this is an test case only, not the one i was talking about before.
So basically the speed increases by 2.7x for a render that is not terrible compared to the original. Disabling the SSS makes a clear difference to the skin color, so that was covered up by using something other than white as the mixing tone for the base diffuse mat.
I've read before about how many figures come with 4K skin maps which are great for super close up, but are pointless for anything like the cases where the figure is 2+metre away from the camera. And given there is almost no difference between the 4K and 1K version at this render size (600x1024px), it seems to be completely true!
So, I hope you all take this to heart and BUY the S.O. product to support the author. Or just keep being dirty little pirates.
lol.