Would love to see an optimised hair shader (or some other way to speed up hair renders. Using hair farm Octane loads the geometry nice and quickly, but render times go through the roof when there is a lot of hair in a scene, especially on pathtracing, this is of course due to the fact that there is a lot of geometry where the light is bouncing about, and also using a lot of samples in that area. An optimised shader could perhaps allow for less samples and a somehow biased rendering of hair areas. If the shader could also emulate hair more realistically that would be great.
Scenes can take about 4 times as long with just one dense hair object in the scene.
My current workflow still involved rendering the hair separately using the Hair Farm renderer as it is so fast and looks great, but of course I have to render that as a separate pass, composite, etc. which gets trickier with depth of field rendered in Octane, and hair not being visible in reflections from the Octane pass.