Thanks. wow really?! Normal beats bump?! Rock beats scissors I suppose.

I thought they would compound like in max.Good to know sir.

My only problem with bump is that it's sooooo sensitive.e Well, I think most of the material settings in Octane are hyper emo sensitive. I hope the normal map isn't not hard to tweak in octane.
I'm going to unwrap the low res bust and do a more pro workflow once I get home. I was also interested in testing the limits of octane and high res meshes. I know people always talk about scene complexity, but I think they mostly refer to like, architectural shots with hundreds of objects. I wanted to see how having one hugely dense model would compare to a scene with tons of low poly objects. I wasn't able to have the 6million poly bust, but the 2 millions came in ok after a few minutes.
One thing I wanted to get down though, being a huge Allen fan, was his likeness. I spent about 6hrs on this the last couple of nights.