Rendering: Firefly vs. Superfly

The new Superfly engine: slow and NOISY

The old Firefly engine: FAST (but unrealistic)

OK, I've bought the latest version of Poser, finally turning years of pirated software into a legit operation. Ish. Hooray! The thing that convinced me was (1) the physics, and (2) a decent rendering engine (which I think is from Blender?). Just look at that glow around the
lights in the top render! Finally, proper lights that actually give out light yeayyy!!



Anyway, here's the problem; Firefly's quick but rubbish, Superfly's slow and noisy. I can reduce the noise but only at the cost of incresing render times by a factor of three or more, which is ridiculous.

This scene doesn't have many polygons in it, only about 6 lights, and yet it takes twice as long for Superfly to raytrace the quick/dirty version.

If I turn the dials up in Superfly to get rid of at least the white dead pixels, render times are prohibitive enough that it's just not worth it. I'm not the sort of person to leave it rendering overnight and see how it went; far too impatient, and you can't do that with a comic because you're always needing to trial-and-error the poses and stuff.

So how do people do it? There must be many who read this blog and have used Superfly for a few years - is there a quick win to get around render times and reduce some of that noise?

There always was in Firefly - cheaty things like removing backfacing polygons and upping the shading rate would reduce render times dramatically without any visible effect. Anyone know what the equivalent cheats are for Superfly? Pleeeease?

Here's a picture of me to inspire you:

...

... I mean ...


... obviously that's not me really. My boobs aren't that big, for starters.