Hair Face Count, Head Framing, and Render Times

livepassioneveryday

I just spent a good part of the day testing render times. I'm trying to make a 2 minute animated short, and I want as much information as possible while I plan out what angles I want to render from. When I finally get to rendering the final project, I will do so while I'm sleeping and at work. That being said, I want to have a good idea how many frames I can get done while I'm away from my PC. So, it is experiment time for me.

So far, my experiments are telling me that the hair is the most important thing I need to figure out, if I want to be able to render it in a decent amount of time. I chose three hair styles to test with, and three shooting angles. I then rendered each scene for 80 iterations at 1920x1080 (the final product will probably be higher res, but I'm happy with the results so far, so I might just stick with those numbers). 

One hairstyle has a raw face count of 11k, the next has 40k, and the last one has 150k. The angles I used are full torso (with all the hair in the shot), full head; and one shot where I framed a lot of the hair out, and really focused on the face. What I found, is that the full torso shots, and the really close shots are the best options for render times. It seems that the difference between the three hairstyles is relatively minuscule from those angles. The full head shots though were vastly different. The per frame render times were 28.6, 32.5, and 57.87 respectively. With this information, I will probably do a lot of my shots with the characters fully in frame, and then focus on the face when they are speaking. I will probably also choose the medium face count hairstyle (40k). It seems to hit the sweet spot. 

That being said, I do eventually want to expand the story to have more characters, and I'll want to have different hair styles. Is there a way to find out the raw face count of a product before purchasing?