Thank you both for responding,
The scene is pretty simple, 2 characters in a very very simple environment... please see attached

- these are the results I'm getting through Iray render time is about 5 minutes
.. the reason I'm asking is the deadline for the project is next week I can either pay for a render farm hire or try to get octane working fast enough to help me pump out content at quality with speed.
I really want Octane to be the solution, I've spent a spent in total a couple of days trying to get the settings right for a speedy / quality render and I just can't seem to get things running fast enough, and that's only with the trial version at 720p. The best time I've got is 1m 40s I think I'm really missing something in the render settings or maybe octane doesn't handle deformation well.. or is my machine funky somehow?
If someone could sanity check a scene for me and that would be so helpful, no need to set up shaders just leave everything 20% grey.
I'm sure I have missed the make it render fast checkbox in the interface

)
If anyone has a little time to help out that would be fantastic, reading the forums Octane seems to be a great little community to join.
Many thanks Ben