Just a wild guess, but I'd say it's the strand-based hair on that character which is causing the long rendertimes, especially if you're using GI or any advanced lighting scheme, like soft shadows. Poser's strand hair is integrated into it's render core, so Poser handles the spline geometry very well in it's native renderer. Of course, if you started using raytraced shadows, you'd see a major jump in render times even in poser.

That said, I'm curious.. your render time in Poser for that image was 80 seconds, but what was it in Carrara? You said the renders came out beautiful, so are they better to the point of justifying the longer rendertime?

Also, I don't own it, but you might look into the Carrara plugin called, "Anything Grows", which supposedly can do things like fur and hair directly in Carrara, with reasonable rendertime. Perhaps you can figure out a way to use it instead of strand hair? Again, I don't know of the full capability of this plugin, or even if it can be useful for natural hair. This is one area I think Carrara lacks badly. Every other app I know of, from Maya to Shade Pro, has hair plugins that render relatively quickly. In fact, one of the best I've seen is now available for Cinema4D. That might be another route you look at (Cinema4D) if Carrara doesn't suit you.

If you used prop hair, and good render settings, I'm sure you'd see a drastic difference in speed.

Message edited on: 01/30/2006 17:29